We Feel Fine

Ever heard of art imitating life?

“We feel fine” is data imitating art, imitating blog.

Most Web 2.0 communities rely on people to populate content, but this website uses an algorithm that requires no human involvement to create a sense of community. The software searches a multitude of popular blog sites for the terms “I feel” and “I am feeling.” Once it finds that catch phrase, it snags the entire sentence and any associated picture, and compiles the items. These feelings and images are presented in several artistic formats, resulting in a highly emotional, very personalized anthology.

In addition capturing to the sentence and picture, the program deduces other data elements to enhance empathy. The program attempts to determine the age, sex, and location of the author, and the tone of the emotion. With location and time, the program also determines the weather at the time the blog was posted. With this information, art is created. The “feelings” are presented in six different artistic movements.

Madness is a swarm of feelings, where color represents the tone of the emotion.

Murmurs presents each sentence as a gently scrolling list of feelings in reverse chronological order since their blog post.

Montage is centered on the pictures captured, with the feeling posted across the image. These can be saved and sent by clicking a link on the picture. Once saved or sent, the picture becomes part of the “gallery of montages,” where people’s favorites are displayed.

Mobs shows the feelings in representative blobs, to show a common thread. The gender, age, weather, and most-common feelings are displayed together.

Metrics shows the feelings grouped by deviation from a common population.

Mounds portrays all of the feelings recorded since inception in relative-sized mounds representing a particular feeling.

Finally, users can find feelings that represent themselves using the Panel. For instance, a user could explore depressed feelings of a 20-year old woman in San Francisco on a cloudy day.

“We feel fine” data has been collected every 3 minutes from several blog sites since 2006.

The authors of this website are Jonathan Harris, an anthropological story teller and computer scientist, and Sep Kamvar, a computational mathematician. They have collaborated on several projects that delve into peoples’ lives online.

See more about their online art:


See an even better video on Jonathan Harris, which includes his projects in Bhutan and a Whale Hunt.

TED: Ideas worth spreading

Most streaming videos can be summed up into two categories – YouTube and advertising. Perhaps entertaining, these videos are not particularly thought provoking, and are most often time wasters.

TED isn’t YouTube. This streaming media delivers lectures recorded at TED conferences around the world. They are all inspiring, sometimes funny, sometimes mind-blowing.

TED is run by a non-profit foundation, with the goal of spreading ideas that stir people’s perspectives. These talks allow people to cross-pollinate ideas with stories that inspire innovation and broaden the plane of understanding, encouraging “out of the box” thinking.

For instance, many lectures in the Art series demonstrate the innovation that occurs when art and science meet. In one story, an engineer was inspired by modern origami, and began to use computer programs to construct incredibly life-like origami creatures. Then, he became involved in applying the concepts of origami back to engineering in order to put big things into small packages, including air bags and space telescopes. (Robert Lang: Idea + square = origami)

TED Talks begin firmly in the real world. The TED foundation seeks out speakers to attend four-day conferences several times each year. These speakers include highly recognized thought leaders who have won Nobel and Pulitzer prizes, as well as emerging thinkers who have not hit the mainstream. The speakers are not paid, and the entire conference is recorded. Some of these recordings are posted online for free.

This is when TED.com goes Web2.0. People are highly encouraged to link, embed, email and show these lectures. The TED website allows comment threads on each video, and also has a tagging mechanism so that users can help rank and identify talks. Beyond basic users, those who become members of TED.com (for free) can upload profile information and connect with each other in the TED community.

The goal of TED.com is to spread ideas that help people better understand the world. Their hope is that this deeper and broader perspective will lead to new thoughts, more discussion, and perhaps a better world.