BrianAndPamela.com

Does this mean I've become a real blogger?  Here I sit on my bed using a laptop to wirelessly update my blog with a post about feelings.  For shame…

Lucky for you it's not a post about MY feelings but about everyone else's, and a neat little site I found that uses some nifty data mining and visualization to show and track the "mood" of the internet.  Read on…

The site is called "WeFeelFine.org " and at it's heart, it's a simple data miner coupled to a visualization tool.  What makes it so interesting is that the data it's harvesting is any place on the web where someone has used the phrase "I feel" or variants there of.  The system then takes all of those feelings, categorizes them and graphs them in some very interesting ways. 

Opening the visualization applet, the feelings swarm around the screen.  To use one of Pammas favorite phrases, they're "all chaotic and twirly", but in a good way.  Clicking on any individual marker gives you the full sentence that contains the feeling.  The other views of the data are just as interesting, maybe more so.  The data engine tracks back to discover basic demographic data (things like age and location, no specific identifiers) and also weather and time.  From that, it can build histories of the "mood" of the blogisphere.

Enough of the science and on to the art and the transcendence of it all.  I love language, especially in smaller snippets that may or may not be contextual.  Especially when contextual clues force you to supply your own meaning, it can be very…enlightening.  That's one of the great things about WeFeelFine.  It gives you a random sentence that is divorced from your knowledge of the author.  Clicking on the second view, or Movement as they call them, Mumblings, brings up line after line of "I feel" posts. 

Does it get emo?  It can, and does, but there's still something intriguing about it.

I don't know, I don't write about internet toys often, but the blending of data visualization (which I'm a big fan of) and the touchy-feely seemingly totally subjective nature of the data made for a very cool counter point.  I feel I have to share.