What Do You Feel?

Today my friend introduced me to one of the most interesting websites I've ever seen in a long time. It's a website called "We Feel Fine" and it was created in 2005 by Jonathan Harris and Sep Kamvar. It's tagline is "We Feel Fine is an exploration of human emotion on a global scale. That alone drew me in to want to learn more. In exploring the website I found that what it was, is that it basically harvests human feelings from a very large numbers of weblogs. How it works is that every few mintues the system searched the most recent blog posts for the words "I feel" or "I'm feeling" when these words are detected, the system copies the phrase - up to the period - and records it. It makes note of the emotion in which the person is feeling and it is linked back to the We Feel Fine website. You can view these feelings in 6 different ways, which the website has titled: Madness, Murmurs, Montage, Mobs, Metrics, and Mounds. You really have to go to the website in order to get the full experience because it's a lot cooler than I'm probably making it sound, but basically, the feelings are presented in a sort of "floating particle" type manner. The darker the color of the particle, the sadder or more negative motion, obviously making the lighter the particle color, the more happy the emotion. Squares include pictures, and the bigger the particle - the longer the sentence. I found myself sitting there for quite a long time clicking random particles and seeing what people from all over the world were feeling. If it sounds interesting to you, you can even click the sentence and it will bring you directly to their blog. I found this website to be so inovative and creative. I've never seen or even heard of anything like this and so I was pleasantly surprised not only by its originality, but by the creative and easy to use layout that it renders.

Check it out at: wefeelfine.org

How'd These Engines Get So Smart?

It's hard to believe, but not too long ago there was no such thing as a "seach engine". Internet users had to find the information they were looking for on their own. But around 1993, the first search engine came onto the scence, it was called W3Catalog and since then more and more search engines have became available to use to seach all areas of the internet. Some of the most popular search engines at the moment are Google, Yahoo! Search, and Bing.

Google is the most popular, and most used search engine of all of these. It hosts and develops several different internet based services and products. The way in which Google makes its profit is through advertisments. Google has become such a popular search engine and part of our culture that the word, or verb, "google" was actually entered into the Merriam Webster Collegiate Dictionary. Google retains billions of web pages that its users can get access to by using keywords and operators.

Yahoo! Search is another web search engine that is owned by Yahoo! Inc. According to Wikipedia, Yahoo! Search provides the ability to "veritcally search" which means that it searchs things outside the Web at large such as images, videos, local, shopping, Yahoo! Answers, audio, directory, jobs, news, mobile, travel and other services.

Bing is one of the newer search engines, it came onto the scene in 2009. One interesting thing about Bing is that it is available in countless languages. Bing has a lot of little features about it that the other search engines don't have that makes it appealing to people who pay attention to and appreciate the smaller details in products they use.

These are only 3 of many search engines available on the internet today. All of these search engines are great, it really depends on the user, what they are looking for, and their personal prefrences. I personally use Google for my search just because I have been using it for so long and I am very familiar with it. I find it easy to use and I always seem to get exactly what I'm searching for by using Google.

0 Friends.. you're better off

After watching the South Park episode “You Have 0 Friends” all of the stereotypical things that are said by people about Facebook were justified. For one, people find the idea that these virtual “friends” that one obtains upon creating a Facebook page are not actually there real friends, but many people feel as though these cyber friends are actually true friends. Also, people compete, whether they admit it or not, to see who can have the most Facebook friends, especially amongst the younger Facebook user crowd, having the most friends makes them feel “cool” or “popular”.

The scene where the character Kip becomes to excited that Kyle added him as a friend and just because they became friends on this site allowed Kip to believe that him and Kyle were not best friends. Also they showed the concept of people taking Facebook and what’s on their Facebook’s so seriously and the idea that it can consume someone’s life so much. When Stan’s girlfriend becomes angry with him because it does not say “In a Relationship” in his personal information section, it shows you how some people care so much about what written on their Facebooks and could actually destroy friends or relationships.

Having a Facebook page myself, the whole idea that Facebook can consume someones life to such an extent, is dumb to me. Probably because I don’t pay too much attention to the information part of people’s profiles, and I don’t allow people to be able to view my profile that I have not personally approved as a valid friend. I use Facebook primarily as a way to share pictures and keep in touch with friends and family that I am unable to see all the time because I am away at school. Although, I am aware that people do take Facebook seriously and so I am careful as to what I write on there and only accept friend requests from people that I know and would not mind if they view the things and information I may post onto my webpage.

Facebook is a very public, much used website, and it is vitally important that people keep that in mind while using the site. Social networking sites like it can become dangerous when people become careless about who they are adding as “friends” and what information they allow these “friends” to see. Many times people who create these websites are creating fake profiles and tricking you into adding them as friend because they want to view your page. All of these things must be kept in mind to any Facebook page owner in order to maintain the safe care-free feeling, entertaining aspect of Facebook alive.