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How Does it Feel?


To better understand the Web 2.0 world, one must be in touch with the specific feelings across online content-generating demographics at a particular point in time and place.

Enter WeFeelFine.org, the excellent real-time visualization of the above, created by Internet artist Jonathan Harris and Google personalization tech Sep Kamvar.

Basically, WeFeelFine aggregates and searches the blogosphere for phrases like ‘I feel…’ or ‘I am feeling…’ One of 5,000 predefined feelings is associated with each post and the demographic attributes are tagged on. Their mission statement describes an “artwork authored by everyone”:

The result is a database of several million human feelings, increasing by 15,000 – 20,000 new feelings per day. Using a series of playful interfaces, the feelings can be searched and sorted across a number of demographic slices, offering responses to specific questions like: do Europeans feel sad more often than Americans? Do women feel fat more often than men? Does rainy weather affect how we feel? What are the most representative feelings of female New Yorkers in their 20s? What do people feel right now in Baghdad? What were people feeling on Valentine’s Day? Which are the happiest cities in the world? The saddest? And so on.

We’d love to hear about any other new and up & coming online tools for understanding audience, culture, society or just having fun.

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Bill Gates, Chad Hurley & Web 2.0-ers at Davos 2007

There’s an unbelievable amount of audio and video (in multiple languages) from the past week’s 2007 World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland available for viewing and download.

I just completed viewing the excellent panel below and highly recommend!

Discuss below. Full info on the panel after the jump.

Continue reading “Bill Gates, Chad Hurley & Web 2.0-ers at Davos 2007”

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Hillary Clinton’s Foray Into Social Media

By turning to the public personally via Yahoo! Answers, Hillary Clinton exemplifies how emerging applications of new media can help to foster and strengthen participatory democracy.

Check out Clinton’s question and the tens of thousands (and counting) of user-submitted answers: “Based on your own family’s experience, what do you think we should do to improve health care in America?”

Read SearchEngineJournal’s blog post about this.

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Lara Logan’s Plea From Baghdad

laralogan.jpgCBS News’ Baghdad Correspondent Lara Logan recently sent out an e-mail pleading for friends and colleagues to push CBS to air her “Battle of Haifa Street” report on any of their news programs. They have thus far agreed only to post the video on their Web site. Watch it here and you’ll see why they’re hesitant to broadcast it. The 2-minute clip closes with a soundbyte of an Iraqi citizens’ experience with American troops that may be just too balanced and accurate for today’s U.S. media: “They told us they would bring democracy, they promised life would be better than it was under Saddam. But they brought us nothing but death and killing. They brought mass destruction to Baghdad.” The text of Logan’s e-mail is below:

From: lara logan
Subject: help

The story below only appeared on our CBS website and was not aired on CBS. It is a story that is largely being ignored, even though this istakingplace verysingle day in central Baghdad, two blocks from where our office is located.

Our crew had to be pulled out because we got a call saying they were about to be killed, and on their way out, a civilian man was shot dead in front of them as they ran.

I would be very grateful if any of you have a chance to watch this story and pass the link on to as many people you know as possible. It should be seen. And people should know about this.

If anyone has time to send a comment to CBS – about the story – not about my request, then that would help highlight that people are interested and this is not too gruesome to air, but rather too important to ignore.

Many, many thanks.