How are you feeling?

I have recently found a new Java Applet called 'We Feel Fine' that i wanted to share with you guys

This applet basically collects the expression of feelings from the blogging world and that is why it was created Jonathan Harris and Sep Kamvar. So read on if you want to find out how the world is feeling...

It scours the internet for blog posts containing the phrases 'I feel' and 'I am feeling' and saves the whole sentence to it's database but it doesn't only harvest the sentence, it also extracts the blogger's gender, age, location etc. Once saved, the sentence is scanned to see if it contains one of approximately 5000 'feelings' which consist of adjectives and some adverb. If a feeling is found, the system sets it to represent one person who feels that way. If an image is found as well in the post that is saved along with the text


The blog data comes from a wide collection of sources including Blogger, Flickr, Google and many more (so i'm assuming this blog post will be found as it contain the relevant search phrase but previous no additional emotion was added... I'll add one of the phrases and an emotion at the end). A user of the applet can refine the data stream by a particular location or emotion and the information can then be display in six ways.... Madness, Murmurs, Montage, Mobs, Metrics and Mounds

Many of the main blogging companie's URL format mean that the username of the blog post author can be extracted so the applet can accessed the other data collected and if a location can be found then the weather for the area can also be added to the database. This whole process is repeated automatically every ten minutes, generally identifying and saving between 15,000 and 20,000 feelings per day, which is quite a lot of feeling!!!

Overall, the user interface is very user friendly and visually pleasing which means that i have a lot of fun playing around with it. I can't quite see an application for the data collected for a normal person viewing it but things don't need a purpose to be fun, if you can think of one please comment about it

You have probably had enough reading about the applet and just want to have a play... so go ahead, don't let me stop you

We Feel Fine

I'm feeling impressed by the visual interface of We Feel Fine (My sentence that will hopefully be picked up by the system, fingers crossed)