We Feel Fine is an infuriatingly interesting project when I’m trying to get some work done, so I’d better blog about it so I can move on.
Here’s how it works (edited from here:
At the core of We Feel Fine is a data collection engine that automatically scours the Internet every ten minutes, harvesting human feelings from a large number of blogs. Blog data comes from a variety of online sources, including LiveJournal, MSN Spaces, MySpace, Blogger, Flickr, Technorati, Feedster, Ice Rocket, and Google.
Once a sentence containing “I feel” or “I am feeling” is found, the system looks backward to the beginning of the sentence, and forward to the end of the sentence, and then saves the full sentence in a database. Once saved, the sentence is scanned to see if it includes one of about 5,000 pre-identified “feelings”. If a valid feeling is found, the sentence is said to represent one person who feels that way. If an image is found in the post, the image is saved along with the sentence, and the image is said to represent one person who feels the feeling expressed in the sentence.
Because a high percentage of all blogs are hosted by one of several large blogging companies (Blogger, MySpace, MSN Spaces, LiveJournal, etc), the URL format of many blog posts can be used to extract the username of the post’s author. Given the author’s username, we can automatically traverse the given blogging site to find that user’s profile page. From the profile page, we can often extract the age, gender, country, state, and city of the blog’s owner. Given the country, state, and city, we can then retrieve the local weather conditions for that city at the time the post was written. We extract and save as much of this information as we can, along with the post.
Which is nice but it’s the interface that really kicks ass here. I particularly like how it displays photographs. Here’s a couple from Birmingham:
It’s like a social art project using automagically generated content and I’m loving it.
via D’log
Later: Thanks to Jon in the comments for reminding me of this TED talk:
There’s an interesting talk from the creator of this, here: http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/144
TED talks are amazing, BTW, if anyone didn’t know that already :)
Thanks, Jon. I remember watching that months ago but didn’t make the connection.
This has been a big influence on me – seeing it was the first time it clicked that the interesting bit is now going to be finding ways to represent all this data now there’s such a ridiculous amount being created.
I wonder whether boring old text based lists will even exist in the future.
I’ve been thinking along similar lines regarding RSS feeds from things like Twitter and Facebook. In themselves not much use but in aggregate potentially fascinating.
Guess you’ve seen this, but if not – very relevant.
http://www.plasticbag.org/files/native/
I’ve found this pretty useful in forming ideas around this stuff.
Utter, utter genius. Thanks for a new addiction, Pete.