Have you ever felt depressed when it’s raining outside? Have you ever been excited about an event in your life? Have you ever used a social networking website or blog to share these feelings? If you have chances are you are part of the We Feel Fine movement.
2005 marked the beginning of the We Feel Fine movement. Since then, the website has been harvesting human feelings from a large number of weblogs. Every ten minutes the system searches the world’s newly posted blog entries, Flickr pictures, Myspace pages and several other online sources for feelings.
The We Feel Fine database scans blog posts for the phrases “I feel” and “I am feeling”. Once such phrases are found, the system looks back to the beginning of the sentence and forwards to the end of the sentence, than saves the full sentence in the database. Once saved, it is scanned to see if one of the 5,000 pre-identified feelings within the database corresponds with the sentence. Finally a color is also assigned to the sentence – red for anger, green for calm, yellow for happy etc. If an image is featured in the post it will be saved along with the sentence. With just one click of a mouse we are able to see into someone’s mind…pretty brilliant huh?
The database is divided into six movements, each of which illuminates a different aspect of the chosen population. These are represented in the easy to navigate We Feel Fine applet. The movements consist of Madness, Murmurs, Montage, Mobs, Metrics and Mounds. In the simplest terms, this allows the public to look at feelings in different views.
The creators Sep Kamvar and Jonathan Harris are clearly interested in dissecting the human world – so much so they have decided to publish their findings in a book that is in the process of creation.
So what introduced me to this? A few weeks ago I was emailed about a picture and blog entry that I created a few years ago. The email was asking me for my permission to use my picture in a book. So out of curiosity I agreed but asked for some more information. After I was emailed back with tons of information about the book, release forms, and personal emails from the writers themselves I realized that this certainly was the real deal! So much to my excitement my picture and the extremely depressing line “I feel like I’m an awful person for doing anything I do” will be in the We Feel Fine book. Did I mention they are looking to publish it internationally as well as in different languages?
After reading up on this movement I have become so interested in the entire concept. To be able to collect such information- millions of feelings, thoughts, hopes, dreams, absolutely amazes me. I couldn’t be more stoked to be a part of this! I certainly foresee this becoming huge and I think everyone should explore the website…
0 responses so far ↓
There are no comments yet...Kick things off by filling out the form below.