I have here a picture of what the tags for the Hope Meter project could look like.  As a quick reminder for someone who wandered onto this blog, the idea is that items would be rated according to whether they make the user feel more or less hopeful.  In this case, I have given positive-rated items a blue color and negative ones a red color.  The spectrum of things tagged would in most cases result in some shade of purple, assuming that most pages tagged would be a mixture of positive and negative things.   I think if you look at the example you'll get a better idea of what I am saying.

 Please remember that this is only an example and not neccessarily  representative of my personal opinions.  

Here's the link for a larger picture:

http://clockwatching.net/~karma/photos_on_www/hopemeter_tags_example.jpg 

Okay, the first thing I'd like to point out is that "cancer" in this example is solidly in the blue.  If you are confused at this point, that would seem strange: Cancer certainly doesn't make most people feel hopeful!  But that's not how it works.  This means that the articles this reader has been using that they have tagged "cancer" all made them feel more hopeful about the future.  Perhaps they tend to read a lot of scientific articles about innovations in research.  In that case, most of the cancer-related pages they come across would likely be studies showing progress made in the fight against cancer.  If all users are consistently reading such positive articles, though we can all agree cancer is terrible, its rating would be blue.  This would indicate that the overall population is hopeful about the fight against cancer.  Get it?

 Okay, lets dig a little deeper.  This whole system could involve some fun comparisons. 

Comparing political candidates could be revealing.  Right now, Clinton supporters are not finding a lot of articles out there that will make them hopeful for the prospects of their candidate, whereas Obama supporters would see such sites daily.  This kind of evaluation of all the candidates, how they're tagged and in relation to the political party or nationality they belong to could be very interesting.  

Another fun comparison could be to look at what things make people feel hopeful.  Inevitably, some things will get tagged that don't really have much to do with the future of the world.  This isn't neccessarily a bad thing because it still reflects how people feel about the future.   Britney Spears is a good example.  I have a friend who loves Britney.  She told me that she used to follow the gossip as a way of escaping into a dream world, much like one might follow royals.  But now it is too depressing for her.  I imagine that her tag bubble would move from blueish purple (those who hate celeb gossip in general would keep it from ever being blue, I think) to red.  But also, what would it say if the things that are blue-tagged consist of celebrities, sports, concerts and other escapist pursuits?  In this respect even apolitical superfluous things could be quite revealing!

Okay, one last example.  It might also be interesting to compare synonyms.  This tag cloud includes both "global warming" and "climate change."  In this hypothetical, I have supposed that the phrase "climate change" would be slightly more red than global warming.  Why?  Because I believe that the former is more popularly used by environmental activists, while deniers almost exclusively use the phrase "global warming."  Though both groups are probably tagging more red, I would hypothosize that those who believe in climate change are a little less hopeful than those who don't.  Of course I don't know this, the whole point is that if we had this site up and running such semantic comparisons might prove to be useful.