i'm not the only one!

true, he's using we feel fine, and he's making them into nice little cards, but Brendan Dawes is looking for feelings online.



here's a little sketch of how he envisioned it working, originally planning to use stickers.



and these are some of the cards.



I like this idea, as it gives you a static and tactile way of holding onto the feelings that would otherwise be lost in time. My idea is quite different, as my piece is going to be as fleeting as the data on the internet, but it's answering the same basic problem: getting emotional data offline and displayed in another way.

pictures taken from his flickr feed.

we feel fine

We feel fine is a web app created with Processing, with the database and data collection side of things handled with Java, Perl, MySQL and Apache. The application searches sites such as blogger, livejournal, myspace and flickr for posts including the words "I feel" or "I am feeling". Once it finds one of these phrases it looks for the sentence it is in, and and then pulls it into the feed.



After it finds the sentence, the app then looks for an emotion, from this list. Emotions are represented by different colours inside the app, yellow being happy, red being angry etc. To view a post you click on a coloured circle or square, which also contain pictures that are linked to the scentence. The interface of this app is really intuitive and sensitive to the movements of the cursor. When you click in the app the dots fly away from you, but after a while some clump around the cursor.

There are several different ways of viewing the data, each called "movements". There are six in total but i'm only going to talk about a couple of them. The view below is called "murmurs" and reminds me a bit of twitter. The dots aren't there to be played with, the data just happily makes it's way to the bottom of your screen.



You can also just see how many people are feeling what within the last couple of hours. At this moment in time a lot of people are feeling better, which is nice. Even when the data is presented in this quite static form, it still jiggles about, like it's alive.



The process is completely autonomous, the program keeps on running without any human intervention, collecting any data it finds about how people are feeling.

I think this is a really interesting site, and while i was only looking at it because it pulls in feeds of emotions which is what i want to do in my project, i've actually ended up spending quite a bit of time on the site. It's not only interesting to see what people are feeling, the interface of the app is really nice to interact with.