e.tv and The Grid break new ground

This post was published on Vincent Maher's blog this morning. It's a project that he and I have been working on in conjunction with the very innovative e.tv Sunrise show. Integrating television and social networks is, in my opinion, one of the most exciting things you can do because of the instant feedback loop you create by merging broadcast and interactive media. At the Mobile Web Africa conference last year Nic Haralambous and I started chatting with the eTV team (eTV is a national television station in South Africa) with the end goal of using The Grid’s location-based mood data to enhance one of their shows.Today we launched the Sunrise MoodMaps on eTV to a national free-to-air audience and so far the feedback has been overwhelmingly positive. During this initial stage we are showing the percentage happiness of each province in the country based on the previous 24-hours of aggregated mood data from our social network. We introduced the concept to the audience today and from tomorrow the maps will be integrated into the two news slots and during the Sunrise show. Nic and I are pretty certain no-one has done this before, please let us know if you find another example of a social network adding moods to a national news/weather show.I will post video footage as soon as we get the files but below is a screenshot of our initial designs for the show. They do look slightly different to the on-air version but they will give you a good idea of what we’re doing.

Wrapping it with contentAs things progress we want to move from general to specific in terms of what these maps show and you can see how this can very quickly become an instant mass polling tool that is greatly aided by the fact that we have location attached to our users.While we were looking through the historical data for the week, as an example, we noticed that the murder of Eugene Terreblanche doubled the total volume of people who were angry on Sunday morning. On average though, the whole country was 6% happier because of the Easter holiday.Working with the eTV team has been great – they are an amazingly innovative group of people who really get the space we’re playing in – and we’re looking forward to making the MoodMaps better every day.