Very cool. I’ve always been waiting for better data mining applications like this to appear. The internet is this living, breathing thing with the pulse of billions of souls. The right software can visualize trends within this maelstrom. A lot of sci-fi over the years hints at such rich mining but you rarely see it.
This tool, part art project, monitors blogs for emotion words (i.e. “happy”) and gives an indication of how many people are blogging about various emotional topics. In essence, how does the internet (and its denizens) feel at the moment? Some very clever, artistic interfaces glob together similar feelings and using color and size give an indication to the relative levels of people’s moods.
Imagine watching such a tool, live, as a great tragedy occurred (or, more positively, a wonderful thing, like the opening of the Olympics).
This information is sitting there ripe for the picking on the internet. Tools such as this can provide real-time, easy to grasp representations of a plethora of information. Can it be abused? Certainly. But that doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t explore the possibilities.