For the ‘web 2.0′ there are once in a while interesting projects that see the daylight, but not enough of it. Rather ‘clonelike’ projects create a lot of buzz, and long term, fascinating players, don’t get enough attention. I figure ‘We Feel Fine’ is one of those: We Feel Fine is an exploration by Jonathan Harris & Sepandar Kamvar of human emotion on a global scale.

‘Huh?’ Was my first reaction. How the hell can they - Jonathan Harris & Sepandar Kamvar - know how I feel. Let alone the whole of mankind? But seems that the global scale is the blogosphere: 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”. As blogpost often contain author name, date, geolocations, … and We Feel Fine even looks op the info in the profile of the blogger, they know - more or less - who you are, what’s your sex, how old you are, where you live, … . The result is a database of several million human feelings, increasing by 15,000 - 20,000 new feelings per day. The internet holds emotions after all! ;)

You can look up those feelings at We Feel Fine in quite a few different ways: Murmurs the most extreme for those who are fond of prying into someone else’s life and Metrics the most fitted for those who prefer general data over one person views.

Interesting because?

• It gives us a ‘voyeuristic’ look on other people’s lives and more important, emotions: gossiping is out of fashion as one does not know one’s neighbours any more, and reality tv continuous to suck. People trust things to their weblogs - and thus the entire ‘web population’ that they often would not even trust their partners with.
• Data! Compare the average amount of happiness in the USA vs happy people in the EU, see if it’s true that the only ones with either euphoric or highly depressed feelings are teenagers, and if the weather has something to do with it. Does astronomy make sense? Do all people born in 1984 feel more or less alike? Were there more ‘I feel disappointed’ people on the day George W Bush was elected president again? Etc.

Can you think of any more interesting uses?

My only ‘doubt’ about this, is that even if it would scramble all the blogs, it is still a bit a biased image the We Feel Fine API paints:

• I tend to blog when I’m a) euphoric/made a new discovery/did something well/very positive feeling or b) sad/disappointed/very negative feeling. I assume this is the same for others, creating an universe of feelings where the extreme ones are represented far more, and the ‘neutral’ feelings are neglected. Now who would write: ‘I feel normal’? ;)
• It will be a representation of the blogosphere’s feelings, thus people who have access to the internet. Which excludes how much of the world’s population? We’ll probably not get feelings from war zones and the poorer countries, which makes this ‘an universe of feelings from the wealthy nations’. If I would type ‘I feel hungry’ and ‘I feel unsafe’ a few times, would that pull things straight, you think? Far from.
• What languages does the application speak? Does it read feelings in Japanese, Russian, Spanish, … and even Dutch? As I could not find any information about that, let us just assume it is ‘the universe of feelings from wealthy nations where one speaks English’.

None the less, gathering blog data from a variety of online sources, including LiveJournal, MSN Spaces, MySpace, Blogger, Flickr, Technorati, Feedster, Ice Rocket, and Google, We Feel Fine is an impressive project.

Tags: we feel fine, web 2.0

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