I’ve seen some amazing websites that allow you to do all kinds of interactive things, from looking at baby name trends to seeking out relationships between musical groups and artists. But this one… wow… this is just incredible.
I found We Feel Fine recently while checking out the speakers on TEDtalks. Jonathan Harris, the author of this effort, spoke about several of his projects including this one. This website scours the web for blogs in which the text “I feel” exists. As in “I feel good“, or “I feel sad“. Then it does all this backend magic and metadata manipulation to create a massively cross referenced user experience, allowing you to get a glimpse of the entire blogosphere of personal declaration of feelings.
It’s overwhelming what you can do from the get-go. You can see groupings of various criteria, narrow or expand selected feelings and emotions, and you can even see a photo montage of images accompanying posts.
This is an amazing way to just “surf peoples emotions”. It puts you in a slightly voyeuristic driver’s seat, letting you get an overwhelming sense of how and what people are feeling and why. Use the menu in the lower left corner to explore all the various ways you can, uh… explore. :-)
And you know, if you find yourself compelled to fire off a word of encouragement to some stranger just from seeing a line about their depression, do it. What better use of a tool such as this?