I feel ...
Life has gone on too fast since the return of holidays, with four nights out of five being out so far. Where is a person supposed to find the time to blog anything worth saying I ask myself. But, I have noticed hits on my blog site of late from a curious looking website called "We Feel Fine". So, I went to this website and discovered something rather fascinating. We Feel Fine was created by a an artist, whose work involves the exploration of humans through the artifacts they leave behind on the Web, and by the technical lead of personalization at Google and a Consulting Professor of Computational Mathematics at Stanford University. This is their mission:
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. Using a series of playful interfaces, the feelings can be searched and sorted across a number of demographic slices, offering responses to specific questions like: do Europeans feel sad more often than Americans? Do women feel fat more often than men? Does rainy weather affect how we feel? What are the most representative feelings of female New Yorkers in their 20s? What do people feel right now in Baghdad? What were people feeling on Valentine's Day? Which are the happiest cities in the world? The saddest? And so on.
If you go to the Methodology section of their website you can read more fascinating things about how they are going about this and what it all means, and the Movements section is quite intriguing, where you can see what feelings look like. The last paragraph of the Madness movement is quite poignant. So, unbeknownst to me I have been participating in this research (and even in endeavouring not to diarise on my blog this system has found the particular entries where I slipped up and did so). I'm contemplating creating a psuedo-self, who writes a blog littered with "I feel" statements and strangely associated pictures, just to play with the system.
