we feel fine

I feel enlightened. Yesterday we laid out on the sandy shores of Third Beach, basking in the afternoon sun and listening to podcasts on John’s iPod. One of my faves, Benjamin Walker’s Theory of Everything [toe] featured a website called “We Feel Fine“.

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.). [WeFeelFine]

The aggregator used by the site can also sift through blogs to find profiles, thus gathering such complete information as: age, gender, location, and then determining (collaborating with other sources) what the weather was like at the time this sentiment was written.

I know some people may think it’s useless and others will spend several minutes (or hours) during their work day today just clicking on the coloured dots and seeing how the world is feeling. But really, it’s slightly more productive than playing one of those flash games where you have to slingshot a rabbit or blast a penguin from a catapult.

Is it voyeurism? Is it scary that someone could collect all this info and display it for the world to see? What about the government, could they could be doing something like this too, listening in on our blog conversations and posts, picking out key words…?

It just might be a vehicle that would guide you to a blog you might start reading on a daily basis or a way to pass the time and connect with someone in Oslo who is feeling uneasy.

Check out the site at least once and see for yourself how you feel about it. Also, try out the Theory of Everything podcast [toe], it’s definitely not to be missed.

(30 seconds ago, 26 year old in Vancouver Canada, when it was sunny).