Olympics bring out the best, the boldest and the dorkiest.
On London’s South Bank, the famous London Eye satisfies at least two of those categories.
The London Eye will be lit up throughout the Olympics depending on Twitter users’ mood, in a project – called Energy of the Nation – that will gauge our enthusiasm for the Games.
The capital’s famous landmark will be illuminated at 21.00 BST each day of the Olympics and Paralympics depending on positive and negative comments made on Twitter. The initiative has been sponsored by EDF Energy and was launched by gold medal-winning decathlete Daley Thompson.
EDF Energy says that this will capture the nation’s excitement (or lack thereof) about the Games; celebrating the highs and lows of the sporting day. It will include displays of the Union Flag in gold, silver or bronze lighting, depending on the medals that Team GB wins. It will also be livestreamed at edfenergyofthenation.com.
The venture is a partnership between EDF Energy and a group of graduates from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). They developed an intuitive algorithm that linguistically-analyses tweets related to the Games. Tweets will be scanned for Olympic-relevant terms such as “Olympics”, “Torch Relay”, “London 2012″ and EDF’s own hashtag, “#energy2012″ …
The total ratio of positive “energy” to negative “energy” will be converted into a pie chart that will be displayed on the London Eye.
The phrase “jump the shark”, as everyone knows, has come to denote the moment when a TV show or other popular thing exhausts its originality and confirms its irreversible decline, as epitomised by the Fonz’s waterski leap in Happy Days.
Arguably the phrase “jump the shark” has jumped the shark. So I respectfully offer as an alternative – to apply to social media specifically or for more general use – “lit up the London eye”.
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