On Saturday, I read an email from YouGov about TellYouGov. It is described as a service to make sure your opinion on any topic is counted in a meaningful way.

Positive or negative sentiments about any topic can be expressed using Twitter, email or SMS (for only the cost of the SMS itself), and are displayed almost immediately on the website. The index page of the website shows the most recent comments; on the separate pages for each of the topics people have so far spoken about is all of the comments in the last 24 hours.

The leaderboard has a strange filter system for organising the topics of the last 24 hours (or 48 hours, 1 week, 2 weeks or 1 month) that I can’t understand but, basically, what’s near the top is the most spoken about.

The first sentiment I offered was by text. It was about cyclists, it was a negative comment (“Cyclists – They should wear helmets and have decent lights on their bicycles. Knowing something about how the road works would be good, too.”) and, surprisingly, it was one of a flurry of comments about cyclists. I didn’t know that anybody felt so passionately about law-breaking cyclists as I do.

Immigration, the BNP,  the Robin Hood Tax, climate change, supermarkets, customer service, recycling, food, jobs, litter, Aldi, the police, “nanny state”, work, mortgages, volunteering, Jamie Oliver, schools and palm oil are all of the other topics I have commented on.

I have also expressed sentiments about cheap meat, the working week, sustainability and Money Saving Expert. Annoyingly, none of these appeared. There is something about the system YouGov is using that means some comments do not get through; I don’t know what it is. In the case of the first two, I should have (and later did) marked them as “food” and “work”. In the case of Money Saving Expert, there were already comments about it, so I do not know why my own didn’t register. I don’t know what happened with the sustainability comment.

I like that there are no usernames displayed, and no conversations take place, though comments are often related to each other. I don’t like that it is only possible to see the last month of comments on any topic. I suppose it would be undesirable to keep all comments indefinitely, but I wonder if they might be able to go through the comments on each subject every day and compile the most interesting or something.

The website is a good idea. I like YouGov’s surveys, but with surveys there is no way for the person doing the stats to know exactly what your opinions are on the subject polled, unless there is a comment box somewhere. Even if there is space for comments, that’s perhaps not what they are most interested in. With TellYouGov, the people who might ordinarily commission polls have an extra source of honest information, information they might never get if from a poll’s resultant pie chart.

For instance, on the subject of cyclists, a lot of people are concerned or annoyed by some cyclists’ abuse of the law by not wearing a helmet and by cycling on the path. If the right person was looking at these comments (and those about the police not properly enforcing laws and even breaking some themselves), perhaps something good would come out of it. For this reason, TellYouGov could prove to be quite powerful. Surprisingly, I haven’t seen much in the way of blatant advertising, and I don’t think that it will be very useful for this purpose.