How do you feel?

I came across this neat little web app today called "We Feel Fine," and I thought that you all might find it intriguing.

"We Feel Fine" is a data collection engine that automatically scours the Internet every ten minutes, harvesting human feelings from a large number of blogs. Blog data comes from a variety of online sources, including LiveJournal, MSN Spaces, MySpace, Blogger, Flickr, Technorati, Feedster, Ice Rocket, and Google.

More specifically, , the system searches the world's newly posted blog entries for occurrences of the phrases "I feel" and "I am feeling" every few minutes. 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.

This process is repeated automatically every ten minutes, generally identifying and saving between 15,000 and 20,000 feelings per day.

I thought this was great because it really helps to show that their is a connection we share with one another while blogging, surfing, etc. that is often overlooked because of a lack of physical connection.

You can visit the website and run the app by going here