Clickstream

We Feel Fine

We Feel Fine is a visualization of the emotional content of what people are blogging. Blog posts are parsed where "I feel" or "I am feeling" occurs, and the feeling is extracted along with the sentence in came in. The application has harvested 4,781,619 posts from over a million people, and counting. That's the easy part.

This data is then aggregated, processed, and additional demographic and geographic data like blogger age, location and weather is retrieved to make fascinating visualizations of the emotional content of the blogs on any given day. Their interface description:

The interface to this data is a self-organizing particle system, where each particle represents a single feeling posted by a single individual. The particles' properties Â? color, size, shape, opacity Â? indicate the nature of the feeling inside, and any particle can be clicked to reveal the full sentence or photograph it contains. The particles careen wildly around the screen until asked to self-organize along any number of axes, expressing various pictures of human emotion. We Feel Fine paints these pictures in six formal movements titled: Madness, Murmurs, Montage, Mobs, Metrics, and Mounds.

They are able to expose the information while making data selections explicit, and interaction simple and fun. I won't bother describing the visualizations of the data because they're colorful, playful, dynamic displays that beat the pants off anything you'd see in a commercial BI tool. Go check it out.

For the record, I am feeling particularly hoopy today.

Posted by Mark Saturday, September 02, 2006 11:38:00 AM | permalink |