This website is so awesome that it deserves its own entry: We Feel Fine / by Jonathan Harris and Sepandar Kamvar
Hmm, how do I say this? THIS IS THE COOLEST DATA COLLECTION WEBSITE EVER! It’s sole purpose is to showcase an amazing array of emotions from the internet community by searching through blogs, Myspace entries, and personal websites. How is the internet feeling today, you ask? We Feel Fine may be the only place where you may find that answer or at least come close to finding it.
You can view emotions randomly, which is great because it’s visually appealing with its floating colored circles (text) and squares (text + photos), or you can view them by choosing specific attributes (feeling, gender, age, weather, location, date). But that’s not all. The project is separated into 6 different “movements” that organize these feelings together.
From the website:
Since August 2005, We Feel Fine has been harvesting human feelings from a large number of weblogs. Every few minutes, the system searches the world’s newly posted blog entries for occurrences of the phrases “I feel” and “I am feeling”. When it finds such a phrase, it records the full sentence, up to the period, and identifies the “feeling” expressed in that sentence (e.g. sad, happy, depressed, etc.). Because blogs are structured in largely standard ways, the age, gender, and geographical location of the author can often be extracted and saved along with the sentence, as can the local weather conditions at the time the sentence was written. All of this information is saved.
The result is a database of several million human feelings, increasing by 15,000 – 20,000 new feelings per day.
I just love how this project flows and is presented. It truly is, by far, the best looking set of data I’ve ever seen put together.
For the record, I feel happy, and yes, I do feel fine. :)
*UPDATE: No wonder! The guys that created this also had a hand in creating 10×10, Wordcount, and Justcurio.us! No need to introduce those sites since I’ve posted them before, but if you haven’t seen them, do check them out.
