A while back, Cara wrote about 10×10 in her blog. Interesting concept but always thought its design and fluidity could see some improvements. Last week I was reminded of the existence of the Webby Awards. This weekend, I had one of these moment where creativity was just not there and I was looking everywhere for anything that could inspire me on the HTML relaunch of Ubenice.com.

I went to the Webby Awards website in search for inspiration First, I was really disappointed to see (1) a lot of not so good work of art and (2) too many corporations represented.

Among those ugly websites, I bookmarked one: the Whale Hunt. This site is the amazing whale hunting journey in Alaska of some guy, an excellent photographer I thought. Not only are the photos pretty but the site itself is also good. When display and content rock together, that’s perfection.

Today I am back on the Webby just looking around to see if I have missed anything. I go to the year 2007 and find an amazing site: We Feel Fine. For some reasons, I feel… Here is a quick summary on what this is, from the site itself:

“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.”

Simply amazing. The thing I like the most about it, is that these people whose feelings we can read did not write these feelings thinking it would be read, by itself as a single piece. What I mean is when you update a facebook or linkedin status, you are perfectly conscious of what you are writing. But when you write a blog post, you can’t think of each phrase as a single piece; you see them as a whole within the content. This makes these pieces of feeling much more powerful to me. I was also playing with the search and looking at feelings from 70 to 79 years old people. I love it and of course, I love the different ways you can have the information displayed.

So what is the common denominator for these 3 projects? Jonathan Harris. All this just make me want to work hard(er) to become one day a programmer & designer that can publish powerful projects like his.

Update: Cara told me I actually knew about this project from Pangea Day, a year ago… :] Oups!