Wednesday, December 6, 2006

Emotions R Us

Just heard this website plugged on the CBC noon hour show here.
http://www.wefeelfine.org/
Here's the basic gist of the thing. From what I know this website takes the emotional pulse of the blogging world and fits it into a pretty powerful database. I'm just startingto explore this thing but apparently you can search specific locations and see what the emotional barometer is reading. You can also develop an emotional forecast of sorts. the iterface is funky too becuase it is set up (and intended as an art project of sorts)
anyhow I'll keep playing around on it over lunch here (actually lunch happens after one oclock for me since I am usually at the schools till then) and let you know what I find...
Here's a quote from the websites 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.

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