At the moment I am all about macro. I am really interested in huge data sets of information and crowd sourcing. I like the 30,000 foot view of what is happening in real time on the web whether it be text, image, or video.
A few years ago I was working with a company in the UK called Dead Earnest and we came up with a mood mapping idea that would track certain ‘mood’ words during the day – happy, sad, angry. We would then create a world map that showed how a city or town was feeling by counting the number of times people used mood words in emails and IM they sent back and forth to each other each day. Viewers would then be able to check in on the map and see how a city was ‘feeling’. The concept never got off the ground due to privacy concerns from the ISP’s. We would have had to source the words to create the maps from emails and IM conversations flowing through the internet providers pipes.
However, I recently watched this TED talk from technology guru and artist Jonathan Harris. Somehow he managed to get the data we had wanted and he created the mood maps he called “We Feel Fine”. Fantastic.
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