Viz: We Feel Fine !

Data Collection:

"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."

Visualization:

"It opens with a wildly swarming mass of around 1,500 particles, emanating from the center of the screen and then careening outwards, bouncing off walls and reacting to the behavior of the mouse. Each particle represents a single feeling, posted by a single individual. The color of each particle corresponds to the tone of the feeling inside – happy positive feelings are bright yellow, sad negative feelings are dark blue, angry feelings are bright red, calm feelings are pale green, and so on. The size of each particle represents the length of the sentence contained within. Circular particles are sentences. Rectangular particles contain pictures."

Data Selection:

When the applet is first opened, the initial dataset consists of the most recent 1,500 feelings collected by our system. The applet's panel can then be used to arbitrarily specify different populations, constrained by any combination of:

Feeling (happy, sad, depressed, etc.)

Age (in ten year increments - 20s, 30s, etc.)

Gender (male or female)

Weather (sunny, cloudy, rainy, or snowy)

Location (country, state, and/or city)

Date (year, month, and/or day)

Website : http://wefeelfine.org/

Reference : http://wefeelfine.org/methodology.html