The current sales percentages of lemons in Algeria. The cost of toothpaste on ferrit. 6000 news items. Photos of your business do. Photos you never wanted to see of your business do. Spam.
The internet is full of crap. In fact, you could think of it as a giant belly button – collecting pile, after pile of blue lint in a near maniac process of collecting, creating, archiving and deseminating information.
A photocopier, sits in a room, photocopying for a million years (sure, it’ll only photocopy for 3 minutes until it jams – but pretend). The paper that it spits out is like the information that google deals with every week.
Hundreds of robots prowl the internet, looking for information. They look for patterns, they look for photos, the look for email addresses to send special deals on blue pills to. Nice of them really. It’s called datamining when the little robots look for patterns to try and figure out what all the nice people on the internet are up to (santa would find this exceptionally handy). It makes some people lots of money, especially if you know that a male, on a sunny day, who owns a green wallet is more likely to buy a can of spaghetti (did you know it had an h after the g?) if asked whether or not he has a breath mint.
One such family of robots looks for how people feel. I feel sleepy. I feel informative. I feel facetious. It grabs all that information, puts it together and turns your feeling into rabid coloured balls that bounce around on your screen on wefeelfine.org.
See those little dots? They’re people’s feelings, most recorded live (by the robots) in the last half an hour. The dark feelings are sad, the bright ones are happy.
Clicking on them reveals the feeling:
You can pile up the feelings and find out what people all over the world are feeling. Turns out people are pretty emotional.
Anywho, enough said. You can check it out at wefeelfine.org. Be aware, some of the feelings (and the images) can be a little dodge. It’s not too bad, but, you never know whether people are feeling incongruous.
In the same vein, a website called universe sends robots out to find information on news in the world. Just like mythology of old, it puts together constellations of information on the topic you give it. Not quite as cool as people’s feelings, but, pretty interesting.
Both these sites are made by a guy named Jonathan Harris, I learnt about him at the gym listening to this podcast.
Have a play. It’s scary to think the footprints we leave with our digital lives. It’s also pretty amazing how you can tap into humanity as a whole, see what joins us and separates us.
