This innovative company allows you to visualize how people are feeling around the world, recording each time someone says “I feel” in their blog.

The website is WeFeelFine.org. We Feel Fine is an exploration of human emotion on a global scale. 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. The result is a database of several million human feelings, increasing by 15,000 – 20,000 new feelings per day.

We Feel Fine is divided into six discrete movements, each illuminating a different aspect of the chosen population. These movements are represented in the We Feel Fine applet.

Madness

Madness, the first movement, opens with a wildly swarming mass of around 1,500 particles, emanating from the center of the screen and then careening outwards, bouncing off walls and reacting to the behavior of the mouse. Each particle represents a single feeling, posted by a single individual.

Murmurs

Murmurs, the second movement, presents a highly structured environment in which to view human feelings. As this movement begins, every particle on screen gently floats upwards, eventually bouncing off the ceiling several times before settling. Then, one by one, the particles are excused from their attraction to the ceiling in order to join a simple scrolling list of human feelings, organized in reverse chronological order.

Montage

Montage, the third movement, was created to answer questions like: what does sadness look like? Happiness? Loneliness? Montage presents the feelings from a given population that contain photographs, and displays these photographs in a simple grid of variable size, depending on the number of photographs available. Any photograph in the grid can be clicked, causing it to zoom in to the size of the screen.

Mobs

Mobs, the fourth movement, consists of five smaller movements, each of which utilizes a self-organizing particle system to configure its shape, color, distribution and physics to best express the different zeitgeists of: feeling, gender, age, weather, and geographical location. Mobs (Feeling) displays the most common feelings in the sample population. Mobs (Gender) displays the gender breakdown of the sample population. Mobs (Age) displays the age breakdown, in ten year increments, of the sample population. Mobs (Weather) displays the weather breakdown of the sample population. Mobs (Location) displays the geographical breakdown of the sample population.

Metrics

Metrics, the fifth movement, consists of five smaller movements. Whereas Mobs expresses the notion of “Most Common”, Metrics expresses the notion of “Most Salient”. Metrics (Feeling) displays the most representative feelings of the sample population, along with some statistical data indicating the significance of the findings. Metrics (Gender) displays a comparison between men and women for the sample population, indicating whether either gender is particularly salient (i.e. do women feel happy more than men?). Metrics (Age) displays the most representative ages (in ten year increments) of the sample population, indicating whether a given age range is particularly salient (i.e. do 40 year olds feel old more than most people?). Metrics (Weather) displays a comparison between the four weather types (sunny, cloudy, rainy, snowy) for the sample population, indicating whether a given weather type is particularly salient (i.e. do people feel depressed more often when it’s rainy?). Metrics (location) displays the most representative locations (countries, states, and cities) of the sample population, indicating whether a given location is particularly salient (i.e. do Canadians feel cold more than most people?).

Mounds

Mounds, the sixth and final movement, is independent of the sample population, always displaying every feeling in our database, scaled and sorted in order of frequency. Each feeling is portrayed as a large bulbous mound, colored to correspond to the feeling it represents. The mounds jiggle slightly when undisturbed, and bend away as the mouse cursor approaches their perimeter. Clicking the screen caused the mounds to jiggle wildly. A small scrollbar below the mounds represents the entire database of feelings, and allows the viewer to jump to a specific point in the list. The viewer can also position the mouse near the left or right edge of the screen to cause the mounds list to self-scroll. Above each mound is listed its feeling, along with the rank of that feeling, and the total number of occurrences of that feeling contained in our database. Clicking the feeling above a mound retrieves feelings from people who feel that way.

Check out We Feel Fine here.

* Note that a broadband connection is required.