We Feel Fine is totally frigging amazing. Think of a random swirling cyberscape of recently-posted-about human feelings and thoughts, decontextualized and floating around, ready for sampling. I could spend hours at this, if, well, if I had hours anyway…
(via Weird is Relative)
This is fascinating. It’s also cool that they published the API.
Yeah, I think so too. I once suggested something like this to someone else — actually, a kind of fatalistic idea, in which a script gobbled up feeds and then correlated usage of terminology with the way it’s used in mainstream news reports. I was kind of fishing for a tool which could measure in some roundabout way how much mainstream media impacts on the very words and terms that are used in popular discussion of news events. I had this dark intuition that probably 90% of what floats around on mailing lists (back then, and now on blogs) can be traced to a very small number of “memetic” sources, which deeply shape most of the distributed discussions. Which is a little oogly. And a bit of a story idea, actually. Kind of an Orwellian recasting of psychohistory or something, maybe. I mean, if 90% of us are just jabbering back and forth using the same language and (say, through Markov chain analysis and proximity correlation) the same basic few arguments that are sanctioned by the media, what the hell does this say about our hoity-toity notions of intellligence? Hmmm. Must think on this.