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