UK General Election candidates, who are they really?

Forget reading manifestos, analysing policy impact on your monthly take-home pay or weighing up the pros and cons of entry into the Euro. Who are our political leaders and, more importantly, what do we really think of them?

What started as a conversation at SXSW launched in double-quick time just over a week ago after a flurry of code production and pixel shuffling.

Tagminster, like it’s cousin brand tags (from Noah Briar), aims to capture the true sentiment of the public; in Tagminster’s case, on the subject of politicians.

On visiting Tagminster you are presented with a portrait of a politician and invited to ‘tag’ them with the first phrase or word that enters your head.

There is also a battle mode which pits politicians against each other and asks such questions as ‘Who do you trust more?’, ‘Who do you like more?’ and ‘Who is the best leader?’.

And because it’s all crowdsourced it’s 100% opinion and 0% spin.

All the data collected  gets presented on a leaderboard showing which politician has won the most battles. At the time of writing a smattering of Liberal Democrats and Caroline Lucas, leader of the Green party, are heading the table. William Hague is the best placed Conservative.

But it’s the outcome of the tagging that provides both interesting insight and utter hilarity. Apparently, Ed Miliband is ‘not as fit as his brother’, Caroline Lucas is a ‘lovely eco pixie’ and Kenneth Clarke is ‘the only decent tory’.

To enable such quick turnaround of idea to launch, Tagminster is built in Ruby On Rails and deployed to the excellent Heroku – a Ruby cloud platform service.

Heroku is great for deploying prototypes and side-projects but also runs some huge services such as Shopify. It also allows you to scale to load just by moving some sliders around and add infrastructure like Exceptional, Memcache and New Relic in one click.

I’ll leave it to you to discover what else people think of our political leaders. You can even turn the profanity filter off if you’re not shy of the ‘c*** bomb’.

One caveat. You have to tag three politicians before you can view the results.