We Feel Fine

This is a bit old, but alogorithms seem to be the rage at the moment. We Feel Fine, is "An exploration of human emotion, in six movements", that scours the Internet every ten minutes, harvesting human feelings from a large number of blogs. Blog data comes from a variety of online sources, including LiveJournal, MSN Spaces, MySpace, Blogger, Flickr, Technorati, Feedster, Ice Rocket, and Google. We Feel Fine scans blog posts for occurrences of the phrases "I feel" and "I am feeling". The data is then illustrated in colorful dots, in a universe-like manner. The equation allows you to break down:

-Feeling (happy, sad, depressed, etc.)
-Age (in ten year increments - 20s, 30s, etc.)
-Gender (male or female)
-Weather (sunny, cloudy, rainy, or snowy)
-Location (country, state, and/or city)
-Date (year, month, and/or day)

Over 8 million feelings have been recorded along with the likes of sexiest cities, saddest cities, most loved cities and happiest states. This methodology is a fantastic read of emotions on a global level, something that omnibus's or surveys probably couldnt get it, with the recording of people's candid blogging nature. Its potentially an incredible tool to read large-scale populations in relation to major events. I feel like im window watching when i read this.


WFF

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