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.

The interface to this data is a self-organizing particle system, where each particle represents a single feeling posted by a single individual. The particles' properties - color, size, shape, opacity - indicate the nature of the feeling inside, and any particle can be clicked to reveal the full sentence or photograph it contains. The particles careen wildly around the screen until asked to self-organize along any number of axes, expressing various pictures of human emotion.

We Feel Fine is divided into six discrete movements - Madness, Murmurs, Montage, Mobs, Metrics and Mounds - each illuminating a different aspect of the chosen population.

Madness

Madness, the first movement, opens with a wildly swarming mass of around 1,500 particles.

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.

Mobs, the fourth movement, consists of five smaller movements: feeling, gender, age, weather, and geographical location.

Mobs (Feeling)

Mobs (Feeling) displays the most common feelings in the sample population. In this movement, the particles self-organize into rows of shared feelings. The rows are sorted by the number of particles they contain, and the particles within each row are sorted by the length of the sentence that each particle contains. The rows are colored to inherit the chosen color of the feeling they represent.

Mounds, the sixth and final movement, is independent of the sample population, always displaying every feeling in our database, scaled and sorted in order of frequency. Each feeling is portrayed as a large bulbous mound, colored to correspond to the feeling it represents.

The Panel

Alongside the six movements The Panel allows the viewer to actually control the sample population on screen at any one time. At all times, the red bar atop the screen presents a concise summary of the current sample population. Clicking that red bar causes the panel to open, and within the panel, viewers can constrain the population along the axes of: Feeling (happy, sad, depressed, etc.), Age (in ten year increments - 20s, Gender (male or female)30s, etc.), Weather (sunny, cloudy, rainy, or snowy), Location (country, state, and/or city), Date (year, month, and/or day).