We have ways to measure interest for digital content. Any content. TV ratings: how many people are watching “Two and a half men”? That’s how much interest there is. Website: how many people are visiting your website? How long are they staying? Take the sum of the products and you get a pretty good idea of how many people are interested in your website.

But how do you measure an emotional reaction after seeing content? Did the movie make you feel sad or inspired? How do you measure that? Did the TED talk make you feel motivated or was it long winded? It might still be interesting either way, and you might have had just enough interest to watch the entire thing, but how do you measure more than just interest? Well, clearly TED asks viewers to tag their videos with reactions, so this is easy for TED. It’s not as easy for an indie film maker posting her videos on youtube, and it’s even harder for a blogger with few readers.

What if you’re a musician, a news channel, web designer or writer. Is there a place where you can put your art and have user easily tell you how they feel about it? Or better but much more difficult, is there something you can do to measure how an audience feels after seeing your art through it’s current platform (be it a book, a store, a TV channel, or movie player)? Even more difficult, can it be done in real time as someone is viewing your TV show? Can you do it passively, i.e. without directly asking? It’s much easier with a live audience that you can see. Half the audience with a puzzled look on their face is a pretty clear indication that they’re confused, and you can see it change in real time.

But can you do this for an online audience? Surveys and comments are common ways of measuring, but they’re more intrusive and only a very small subset of an audience will participate. TED talk’s use of tags is the best solution I’ve seen so far, but that only works on TED, and probably only works with certain types of audiences which TED is fortunate enough to have. We need a way to do this en mass, with as little initiative from the audience as possible. A better question to ask is not can you do it, but how can you do it? Assume it’s possible first.

I can imaging browser plugins or something integrated with the facebook platform to allow users to add reaction tags to content. That’s not hard to develop. Once someone develops that, how do we do better? Those tags won’t be made in real time. They’re always made after the fact, so the ending of a movie can have a huge effect on what you feel about it, and it can and often will change the way you think you felt before the ending.

I don’t have an answer. I just thought about the question, but it’s an interesting question to think about.

Does anyone care? That’s a different question. I imagine at least the content producers will like to know.

I had this thought while listening to an excellent speech recommend by a friend about the quality of content produced on TV and how “ratings” tell you so little about what the effect of the content is doing on the audience nor does it tell you much about how the show could be better. The speech was made with regards to concerns about what TV is doing to societies health. This was in the 60s, funny how we have similar issues now with the internet 50 years later, and funny how an idea (or question) can be inspired by such a small subsection of another idea. Anyway, you can listen to the speech here.