Social Media Voyeur: How Do You Feel?
One of my worst traits is eavesdropping on conversations while in public places: restaurants, stores, walking down the street. Drives my wife crazy. It’s so entertaining to hear little, personal snippets of stories without intruding or affecting the conversation.
Apparently I’m not the only one. Artist and computer scientist Jonathan Harris launched a computer program that monitors and captures the “mood” of the Internet. His system scans blogs throughout the world every few minutes looking for entries including the words “I feel…” or “I am feeling…” Grabbing nearly 20,000 feelings/entries per day, his system includes over 7.5 million entries. So then what?
His elaborate database of emotions is fed into a visual interface available at www.WeFeelFine.org. Definitely check out his web site to really understand and appreciate it. The system allows to view results by feeling, gender, age, location and weather. Yep, weather.
Below is his “The Web’s secret stories” presentation at the 2007 TED Conference:
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Autumn on September 20, 2008 @ 10:05 pm
http://www.WeFeelFine.org – This is so human, that it reminds me that that’s what I am. Some of these comments I could claim as my own if I thought to write them. I like this one “Sometimes I feel like people live farther apart than the distance between these windows.” I also like the design of the interactive page more than anything I have seen in a long time. It reminds me of Pop Rocks. Which I happen to miss. I wonder if anybody else on there feels that way.