This is fascinating, amazing, and beautiful: We Feel Fine.

Mission: We Feel Fine is an exploration of human emotion on a global scale.

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.

I haven’t looked at it too much, but I skimmed the movement page (helpful) and then opened the applet and played a bit. Fantastic.

From the NGC4LIB mailing list (on which I am very, very, very behind in reading, much as I am with WEB4LIB).