We Feel Fine
Not too long ago, very randomly, I checked the comments on my old blogspot blog - remember her? It's rare, but I do get the occasional comment over there.
A few days before I checked, someone named Hannah had left a message saying she wanted to include one of my photos in a book based on the website We Feel Fine.
I thought it might be adverstising. I'd never heard of We Feel Fine, and while the comment was better written than other similar marketing ploys I've seen, still. Why not just email me? I am definitely not the hardest person in the world to find.
Anyroad.
No ploy, it's all on the up-and-up. And it's a totally crazy wicked website, though I would suggest reading the explanation before opening the actual app. Once you figure it out though, holy fuck. Expect to have half an afternoon sucked away in the click - or two or three or so - of a mouse.
Funny thing: turns out it's not my photo. Well, technically, it is my photo, in that it is a photo of me. But a photo of me taken by Woodsy while I was very happily sporting a binder clip in my hair.
We've both given our permission for the authors to use our words/image/likeness, and if/when the book comes out, believe you me, I'll keep you informed.
Had a look at that website, and not for the first time I wish I had high speed internet so I could fully appreciate something on the web!
How the hell, did they come accross you in the sea of blogs and images? Is it because you say "I feel" a lot and someone said "Wait! Who is this person with all this emotion? Find her! Bring her image forth, so I may bask in her feelings!"?
If impressed was a colour, that's the colour I'd be!
Ooops! Sorry Dave. I forget about you there, sometimes, perched on the edge of your lake in the middle of frickin nowhere.
I included the the explanation from the "Methodology" page on WeFeelFine.org below.
But honestly, I don't know how they found me in the sea of all that. Maybe not many people have feelings about binder clips?
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"At the core of 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.
We Feel Fine scans blog posts for occurrences of the phrases "I feel" and "I am feeling". This is an approach that was inspired by techniques used in Listening Post, a wonderful project by Ben Rubin and Mark Hansen.
Once a sentence containing "I feel" or "I am feeling" is found, the system looks backward to the beginning of the sentence, and forward to the end of the sentence, and then saves the full sentence in a database.
Once saved, the sentence is scanned to see if it includes one of about 5,000 pre-identified "feelings". This list of valid feelings was constructed by hand, but basically consists of adjectives and some adverbs. The full list of valid feelings, along with the total count of each feeling, and the color assigned to each feeling, is here.
If a valid feeling is found, the sentence is said to represent one person who feels that way.
If an image is found in the post, the image is saved along with the sentence, and the image is said to represent one person who feels the feeling expressed in the sentence."