Most of you out there have heard of StumbleUpon; a web site that is all about discovering cool, new and interesting things on the web.
On my personal blog I got a click-thru today from something Stumble Upon-ish but absolutely different from the way SU works called We Feel Fine. Had the click-thru not happened I never would have been aware this site existed.
WFF’s mission page states what they do best:
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.
When you load the WFF system you see this mass of colored blobs flying across the screen. Clicking one shows a blurb from a blog and presents the option to go to it. It is something very unique that I haven’t seen on the internet before (and believe me, I’ve seen a lot.)
Some warnings:
- WFF is run using a large Java applet. Older computers will probably crash on attempt to load it so you need a computer with a little “oomph” to it.
- The Java thing does use (safe) pop-up windows which are sure to disagree with just about, oh, every user of PC Mech that clicks thru to go to WFF.
I found it is o.k. to let the pop-up’s thru as I didn’t see anything bad happen when I did. - The content is unfiltered. Use at your own risk.
Some tips:
- Use the top nav bar in the applet to narrow down “feelings”
- The “six movements” are located at the bottom left and are click-able. The default is “madness” that shows swirling blobs. Clicking others is a lot more manageable.
True, this is not a tech-style post, however sites like this do actually provide entertainment that’s actually useful. And technically speaking, it’s fairly easy to get demographical information using WFF.
Link: We Feel Fine
