I love this site: We Feel Fine. It's really well designed, addictive to play with, and gives you an interesting insight into humanity and what people are thinking/hoping/worrying about. It's also a really innovative approach to repurposing content, kind of like animating a Google search about feelings. Ian Tait at CrackUnit explains better than I can:
I’ll try to summarise why I think it’s such an important site. The most important reason is that it’s a site that’s built of user generated content. But without anyone generating content for the site. What the site does is to go and ’scrape’ lots of other websites and pull out sentences where people have said “I feel…” or “I am feeling…”.
For example, if on a MySpace page I’d said “I feel like I’m coming down with flu”, it would pull this sentence into the database. Then it would look at my profile and say, OK, a 33 year old male from London says he feels like he’s coming down with flu. It would also look at the date and location on my post and use this to figure out the weather. So it would then be able to add the fact it’s raining to the context of my words.
It’s so clever. It’s recycled, repackaged and re-ordered loads of human content from around the web. And by doing so it’s created something much more interactive and compelling than the original words themselves. But the real feat, is that for all it’s cleverness, the site itself feels simple and easy to use. And it looks beautiful too.
(And props to Russell Davies for originally pointing this site out.)
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