About
What is sentiment?
A thought prompted by passion or feeling; a state of mind in view of some subject; feeling toward or respecting some person or thing; disposition prompting to action or expression.
Hence, generally, a decision of the mind formed by deliberation or reasoning; thought; opinion; notion; judgment; as, to express one's sentiments on a subject.
A sentence, or passage, considered as the expression of a thought; a maxim; a saying; a toast. [Source: http://brainyquote.com]
At PublicSentiment.net, we are hoping to capture people's opinions about timely, public events. Opinion polls by the popular media hardly reflect people's nuanced sentiments about things like politics, religion, public policies, or foreign affairs. Polls make us out to be divided along arbitrary lines, but personal beliefs are anything but black and white — or red and blue.
Instead, we hope to reveal and share the spectrum of people's unedited, raw opinions about certain current events. We hope you will participate by contributing your own sentiments and reading the sentiments of others. Perhaps you will hear of a novel point of view; perhaps you will find others who share your quirky opinions; or perhaps you will discover that the Reds aren't that different from the Blues after all, or that there are more "Independents" out there than the media would have you think.
Our site is intended to provide a glimpse into public sentiment on the web. We are collecting short essays and commentaries by people on Mechanical Turk, Twitter, and through this site directly. This is not intended to be an authoritative source or official opinion poll, but we do hope that this venue can be an outlet and repository for individual, independent voices.