They feel fine, I feel sensational

I have come across a glorious site that is beautiful and organic to look at an in some way makes you feel better. I feel fine by Jonathan Harris and Sep Kamvar http://www.wefeelfine.org/ is about exploring human emotions. The big idea is that they harvest sentences with emotions in them from Blogs and have done since 2005. So when I write: I feel sensational, it picks it up. And as hardly anyone uses the word sensational, hopefully I will come across it when looking at the map some time. You can search the feelings by the weather, age, sex, location and date. But most wonderful is the interface, where a colourful universe floats in front of your eyes and if you roll over a dot or square (squares have pictures as well as words), it shares someone’s emotions with you. What makes it so magical and frankly addictive is the way that on clicking it, the letters appear in a circle, swing round and form the words and then go to the top, it really has been beautifully done.
If you click on the selection of words at the bottom left, you can see the screen in different ways, madness: where the dots and squares float around, murmers, which is lines of text, montage which is images, mobs and metrics are visual representations of who is saying what. But my favourite is mounds. Here you have a graph, which reacts to your mouse over, turning the graph into mounds of jelly which bump and bend off each other.
These statistics are lovely to look at and are quite interesting. There are only three men and three women feeling sensational. They are feeling it when it is cloudy and are generally between 20 and 35. It is rare, 315768 times the normal level. Well now there is one more…