Olympic tweets to power a daily light show on the London Eye

EDF Energy, the official electricity supplier of the London 2012 Olympics, will be using tweets sent during the games to gage the “Energy of the Nation”.

The power company will scour the raw Twitter feed looking for content, hash tags and links that relate to the Olympics (and which originate from within the United Kingdom), which it will then analyze using an algorithm designed by Professor Mike Thelwall, from the University of Wolverhampton, and Sosolimited a team of linguistic and data visualization experts from MIT. This algorithm will extract positive and negative words, phrases and emoticons from the tweets and generate an hourly percentage showing how positive (or otherwise) British people are feeling about the games.

The results from this will be projected, in the form of a pie chart, on to the London Eye as part of a nightly 24-minute light show, with every minute representing one hour of the day. The lightshow will also feature displays of the Union Jack using gold, silver and bronze lighting to reflect any Team GB wins.

The lightshow is being promoted by decathlon gold medalist Daley Thompson, who said, “Hosting the Games in London is an incredible once in a lifetime event and as a passionate supporter of the Games I want everyone to get behind the athletes and really show their support. We need to get behind our favorites to power them onto gold. EDF Energy of the Nation gives you a really easy way to join in, wherever you are and help drive a world first every night on the EDF Energy London Eye -- a light show powered by the nation’s tweets”.

To ensure tweets about London 2012 are considered, they should include the #Energy2012 hash tag.

Messages along the lines of “EDF Energy sucks #Energy2012 #Olympics” will probably be excluded.

Photo Credit: London 2012 Olympic Games