this is absolutely fascinating: we feel fine is a little piece of brilliant software that captures thousands of “feeling” statemtents from blogs and turns them into gorgeous visual stats and, well, art. see all those little colored spots in the photo on the right? those are all feeling statements from blog posts in the last hour or two. you can mouse over them and click on them and read the statements. here’s a paragraph from their “mission”…

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.). Because blogs are structured in largely standard ways, the age, gender, and geographical location of the author can often be extracted and saved along with the sentence, as can the local weather conditions at the time the sentence was written. All of this information is saved.

it’s really worth a few minutes to poke around on this. and if you have a 1/2 hour, make sure you look at some of the photo/statement combos on the montage page.

wow.

(ht to D’Caffeinated Pickle)