Monday, April 27, 2009

'We Feel Fine,' Sort Of

Brooklyn artist and computer scientist Jonathan Harris wrote the "We Feel Fine" program that paints an online picture of what the world is feeling.

"We Feel Fine" searches through the world's blog entries looking for occurrences of "I feel" and "I am feeling." It also looks to see what else is going on in the world, and finds information about the poster's demographics, the weather, etc.

It collects about 20,000 sentences a day, represented by colored dots on the screen -- the happy thoughts are bright, the sad thoughts are dark.

You can also focus down to what certain age groups are feeling, or people from certain cities, certain genders, etc. For example, in New York Saturday -- on a shimmery, summery day -- the mood of bloggers was not quite as sunny as the weather.

Go to McBrooklyn's HOME PAGE.

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