Yeah, You and James Brown

It won’t come as news to anybody that blogs — all the “citizen journalist” talk notwithstanding — aren’t where you typically find news. They’re where you find feelings: reactions to news, sure, but also just general reactions to family and work situations, reactions to human behavior, reactions of self-approval and -disillusion, and so on.

Somebody finally decided it was time to weigh all that emotion. (Which, among other things, allows bloggers to record how that information makes them feel.)

Warning: We’re entering time-sink territory here.

Here’s how the folks at We Feel Fine summarize their mission:

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.

You may find this Orwellian. You may find it absurd. You may wonder what this says about the state of the world, the Internet, human nature…

All of which, of course, you should feel free to blog about.

The image at the top of this post shows a partial screen capture from one of WFF‘s “movements.” (Each movement is a different way of representing the underlying data.) Here, the site apparently takes forms of the phrase “I feel” and captures the word which follows. As you can see, as of the time the database was most recently updated, 3,950 bloggers felt strange, and “strange” was the 77th most common feeling. (This is probably a huge undercount; 100% of bloggers seem to feel strange close to 100% of the time, they just tire of writing about it.) At the moment, the project is taking the emotional pulse of over two million blogs.

Incidentally, I learned of WFF from the excellent ResearchBuzz newsletter. (Anyone interested in doing online research will probably faint dead away to learn of its existence.) Specifically, I picked up this item from the @researchbuzz Twitter feed; I don’t see anything about WFF on the ResearchBuzz Web site at the moment. That tweet led me to an article on Newswise, which (among other things) also introduced me to “the optimistic Irish economist Francis Edgeworth[, who] imagined a strange device called a ‘hedonimeter.'”

Which, um, makes me feel pretty good.