Today we properly launched our Monkey campaign for the Olympics. I was in work at around 7am getting various bits and pieces prepared, then just before 8am we unleashed the two-minute promotional video on the internet masses. I wrote a short blog entry as well, giving people who see it the chance to tell us what they thought.

The divide in opinion is brutal.

We knew this was going to happen - some people in our department love Monkey, while others have, to word this carefully, had some questions after it finished. But nobody has just seen it, shrugged their shoulders and wandered off again. Which I personally think is always a sign that something has gone right, and it feels like that same polarisation of opinion is coming through online. Most people seem to either love it or hate it.

So much so, in fact, that I started keeping a tally next to my desk earlier:

The tally has generated much interest all day, with colleagues eagerly counting up each side as they walk by. We really, really care what people think about this. We've all got our own opinions but nobody has known how the video would be received. Words can't express how happy I was when the first blog comment came back positive, and that's not to say I don't want to know about the criticism - I've read every single comment as of this moment in time, and digested every view.

By the time I left work, Monkey lovers had a healthy double-digit lead, but since then almost another hundred people have signed in to have their say on the blog. Frankly, it's heartwarming that people on both sides care so bloody much that they're prepared to come in and fight their corner.

Some people have mounted passionate defences of the BBC's remit to commission creative works from top British artists, and expressed horror that, in their view, some of their fellow Brits are so closed-minded. Others have demanded to know why the corporation appears, to them, to have forsaken British athletes and a sense of the "real" Beijing for an animation they think has more in keeping with CBBC.

If only viewers cared so deeply, either way, about every title sequence. I can't remember any of the Olympics intros of years past (my only real memory of Sydney is watching Cathy Freeman win the 400m on our tiny television at school), but I swear that even if I hadn't been heavily involved with this one, I'd remember it in four, eight or 12 years' time.

Me personally? I'm a fan, but it took me a bit of time. At first I was surprised that the gold-infused, celebrating-athlete approach was being binned in favour of a monkey with a stick, but now we've released the finished product into the wild, I'm proud to be even vaguely associated with it. For me it's the music that does it. Watching the animation with no sound doesn't have the same effect - the audio adds so much.

This is the comment that most sticks out from the ones I've read today:

Well done, BBC, for doing something a little more interesting and unexpected than shots of the city, shots of the athletes, shots of children smiling. It's very refreshing and it makes me very excited about what you will do in 2012. Keep up the good work.

We've barely had time to draw breath since launching our 2008 model, and already the heat is on for London. It's been a huge effort this time around trying to make our Olympics site absolutely sing ahead of Beijing - the map, Monkey, vast numbers of stories, blogs and columns, strong relationships with athletes, embedded video and more (our Flickr feed, for example, passed one million hits last night, which is fantastic.) Doing that in four years' time, with the Games in our own country, is going to be phenomenal.