London Eye Olympic Light Show Powered by Tweets

ngland will light up next week with the glowing torch of the 2012 Olympic Games, as well as a London Eye light show – the world's first social-media driven spectacular.

Athlete Daley Thompson, in conjunction with EDF Energy, has rigged the city's landmark ferris wheel with bulbs that will shine each night of the Games in relation to Twitter feedback.

Based on an "intuitive algorithm," real-time tracking of the Twitter hashtag #Energy2012 will split comments into positive and negative categories according to words, phrases, and emoticons, then filter them into the light show. Sentiments could include thoughts like "best," "amazing," "shivers," or "tears," which are given scores to boost or reduce the energy count. Punctuation (exclamation points are good, questions marks are bad) is also taken into consideration, EDF said.

U.K. Twitter sentiment analyst Mike Thelwall of the University of Wolverhampton, along with a team of MIT graduates, helped build the EDF methodology. Tweets will also be scanned for words like "Olympics," "Torch Relay," and "London 2012."

Thompson, a gold-medal decathlon winner in 1980 and 1984 told the BBC that he understands what it means to participating athletes when they know the whole nation is supporting them.

"We want to make the EDF Energy London Eye a spectacular showcase of national support for the athletes," Thompson said. "And one that will inspire them every night of the Games."

The wheel will brighten depending on the "Energy of the Nation," meaning that if 75 percent of the micro-blogging world sends happy thoughts about the Olympics, three-quarters of the London Eye will light up. Each day's top sporting moments will be visualized using different colored lights.

EDF Energy promises tweeters' data will not be collected for marketing purposes. "We just want to give everyone a better view of the way we're all feeling about London 2012 and celebrate it," the official electricity supplier of the Games said on its website.

The light show will begin at 9 p.m. BST each night of the Olympics and Paralympics.

The 2012 Games will be social-media heavy, counting among its offerings a Facebook'sExplore London 2012 Olympics platform, cross-promotion from NBC and Facebook, live-streaming apps from Adobe AIR and NBC (now available for iOS and Android), and the International Olympic Committee's own Olympic Athletes' Hub.