We Feel Fine

This website is awesome!... But hard to explain. It's one of those sites you just have to see. But here's how it works... Every few minutes, the site searches all over the web for newly posted blog entries with the words "I am feeling" or "I feel". When it finds it, it records the full sentence and actually identifies the feeling expressed in that sentence. Also, the age, gender, location, and weather at the time of the writing can be extracted from the blog and saved with the sentence as well. As quoted on their page (because this is the best way to describe it): "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?" (and so on) "The interface to this data is a self-organizing particle system, where each particle represents a single feeling posted by a single individual. The particles' properties – color, size, shape, opacity – indicate the nature of the feeling inside, and any particle can be clicked to reveal the full sentence or photograph it contains. The particles careen wildly around the screen until asked to self-organize along any number of axes, expressing various pictures of human emotion. We Feel Fine paints these pictures in six formal movements titled: Madness, Murmurs, Montage, Mobs, Metrics, and Mounds." This is really cool! Each one of the above "M words" you click will present the blog world's feelings to you in six very different and very colorful ways! One of them is a ton of brightly colored moving dots. Moving very fast. Another is a graph that scrolls so far it seems never ending (but does end. Eventually!). The others are awesome too. Alas, the site also says "At its core, We Feel Fine is an artwork authored by everyone. It will grow and change as we grow and change, reflecting what's on our blogs, what's in our hearts, what's in our minds. We hope it makes the world seem a little smaller, and we hope it helps people see beauty in the everyday ups and downs of life." And I must say, it lives up to its expectations. This site I can say is definitely an original, colorful, heartfelt, honest, expressive work of art. One of my favorites. Check it out, you won't regret it.