I recently came across this fantastic website called We Feel Fine. It’s a website that crawls blogs and journals all over the Internet looking for the phrases “I feel” and “I am feeling”; when it finds one of these phrases it pulls out the whole sentence and stores it on the site. Once it has been stored, you can access these “feelings” through a graphical applet, and follow links back to the blog they originated from.

The real beauty of the site is the way it presents all the data it finds. The normal view is that of a black background with thousands of little coloured circles and squares flying around, a circle representing a sentence, and a square representing a sentence with a picture. Each of these is colour coded to try and represent the sort of feeling contained in the sentence, ie - red is angry, orange is happy. You can click on any of these little shapes and up will pop the sentence attached to them, the larger shapes having long sentences and the smaller having short phrases.

You can also filter the data through many catagories such as: age, gender, date, country and even the weather at the time the message was written. There are also other ways of looking through the feelings, for example you can get a grid of pictures (from all the posts with pictures) or just random sentences popping up one after another.

I found the site really fascinating, and some of the entries really moving. I generally prefer just to look at the feelings and not click through to the blog of the person who wrote it, that way I have a freedom to interpret what they say in any way I want, and maybe even get a reflection of my own feelings in the process.