“Communications is technology.”
Or something like that.
That’s what my daughter said excitedly as she told me about her new english major courses at George Mason University. The excitement in her voice and the enthusiasm in her eyes made her impromptu presentation contagious.
She took me to the creation of Jonathan Harris and Sep Kanvar.
It is a site called We Feel Fine.
Check it out. I don’t know if it is the future of communications and literature. But it is certainly fascinating. It is literature, research, ethnography, technology, emotions, and crowd-sourced literature all rolled into one.
According to the site:
Since August 2005, We Feel Fine has been harvesting human feelings from a large number of weblogs. Every few minutes, the system searches the world’s newly posted blog entries for occurrences of the phrases “I feel” and “I am feeling”. When it finds such a phrase, it records the full sentence, up to the period, and identifies the “feeling” expressed in that sentence (e.g. sad, happy, depressed, etc.). Because blogs are structured in largely standard ways, the age, gender, and geographical location of the author can often be extracted and saved along with the sentence, as can the local weather conditions at the time the sentence was written. All of this information is saved.
The result is a database of several million human feelings, increasing by 15,000 – 20,000 new feelings per day. Using a series of playful interfaces, the feelings can be searched and sorted across a number of demographic slices, offering responses to specific questions like: do Europeans feel sad more often than Americans? Do women feel fat more often than men? Does rainy weather affect how we feel? What are the most representative feelings of female New Yorkers in their 20s? What do people feel right now in Baghdad? What were people feeling on Valentine’s Day? Which are the happiest cities in the world? The saddest? And so on.
And so with that, I’ll say this, hoping that at some point some of these nuggets are harvested by the We Feel Fine site and that my contribution adds to someone’s day and another person’s science.
I feel good. At least today I feel that way. There have been many days in the past when I’ve felt bad. Perhaps even miserable. But today’s a good one. So far. You never know. I could be feeling crummy this afternoon. Something crazy could happen. I could remember something stupid and start feeling blue. Feelings are that way. Very capricious things those feelings are. But right now, I feel good. And the fact that I’m feeling good, feels good.
Have a nice day.
I worked for Jody first at Ogilvy and Mather and then as one of the original Powell Tate team. He was a great mentor and an even greater friend. He was at the same time demanding and incredibly forgiving. He was a hard nosed negotiator and also extremely generous. He was loyal to those close to him but also open to others. His care for people went beyond the individual. He made an indelible impact not only on me, but also on my wife and children.
Last Sunday I started on a series of email exchanges with friends on things theological. What prompted the online discussion was a close friends’ bridling at the Pontiff’s message to the Kennedy family following Senator Ted Kennedy’s death. The discussion took many different twists and turns and involved several people — some you’d recognize — but ended (or last left off at …) in a discussion of faith and works. The closing observations even included the catchy and often derided “
According to 
I wonder if Eisenberg would be so charitable if someone else was Tweeting about him every time he, say, applied for a job or pitched a show idea.
Some may focus on the flaws of Ted Kennedy. But whether you are right or left, conservative or liberal, religious or secular, what should him a role model for us all was his unique combination of two things: genuine personal compassion combined with a strong work ethic.
If you want a lesson on how to defuse outrageous claims with a combination of simple language, mild put-downs, some humor, and compelling logic, 
Then along comes the great market meltdown. Unregulated capitalism goes crazy. Markets melt down. Some capital owners get dinged but most capitalists do well. Meanwhile consumers take it on the chin. CEOs still pull down healthy checks but blue collars are standing in welfare lines.
The confirmation of this breakthrough discovery came late last week amidst the craze over the “
Like the towel rack in the first floor bathroom that fell off its delicately secured latches sometime during the winter that you always said you were going to put back …
For the Wharton professors, question was this: “All other things being equal, is there a difference between a putt for a par and a putt for a birdie?” For folks not skilled in the rules and scoring of golf, a par is the number of shots set as a “standard” for a particular hole. A “birdie” is one less than par. So a hole that is set on the scorecard as a “par 4” is a hole that you’re expected to complete in four strokes or shots. If you do it in three, that’s a birdie.