We Feel Fine is, according to the web site, “an exploration of human emotion, in six movements.” The creators, Jonathan Harris and Sepandar Kamvar, have written software which trolls the blogosphere and gathers statistics about how people are feeling. More precisely, it scans blog posts for occurences of the phrases “I feel” and “I am feeling” and catalogs the results. At first it just looks like a random jumble of swirling circles (this mode is called “madness”), but it draws you in the more you explore. Click on murmers, and it starts showing random messages about how people are feeling, along with their locations and the time they wrote it. Eg. “i feel the sparks of a crush” or “i feel it is altogether more likely to happen than my other life ambitions.” Other modes tally up the feelings in interesting ways. Neat stuff. I’m a sucker for this kind of purposeless data mining of the ‘net.
Via Cool Hunting
Actually, after sufing the site, I would have to disagree - I think there is great importance and purpose re: the data on this site…it makes the world feel much smaller, which fosters hope and feelings that positive change is happening –it builds empathy for world citizens…how? Try this… search the following statistics, “happy-man-china-30s” “happy-man-iceland-30s” and “happy-man-san francisco-30s” - the results are enlightening…I could feel my love for humanity grow. I’ve never seen graphic design like it before…I was also extremely intrigued by Jonathan Harris’ 10X10 http://www.tenbyten.org/, which automatically chooses the top 100 words and pictures in the world every hour based on what’s happening in the news…These two sites have me thinking about the power of the internet and blogging in new ways. Thanks for the posting.- Ally