setting : I assigned the students to search salary.com for a technology job in the Boston area. Most were impressed by the amount of money a web developer could make. Then one student looked up “teacher” and the following dialogue occurred.

student A : “YO MISS! Teachers is mad strapped!”
student B :  “NO WAY!”
student A : “You gotta quit this scene, Miss, go out and make that money!”
student C : “Yeah Miss, don’t you want that house on the hill?”
student B : “Yeah you gotta make that money and get that house on the hill…”
student C :  “…and invite us all over for a party!”
student A :  “For REAL!”

I just clicked to learn more about the Yahoo time capsule’s creator, Jonathan Harris, and found his “We Feel Fine” site. WOW. Whatever you are feeling - happy, sad, bad, better, gloomy, alone, angry… - this site proves that you are not the only one out there!

We Feel Fine has been harvesting human feelings from a large number of weblogs since August 2005. 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.). The blogger’s age, location, and gender are identified and recorded into a database along with their feeling. The database grows every day by tens of thousands of feelings! Harris built a Java applet-based interface that allows users to search the “madness” of the blogosphere for what people are feeling, at the moment, by location, gender, or the feeling itself. “Montages” are recently posted photos about feelings.

I personally love watching the “murmurs” trickle down the page every few seconds. It is comforting if you are feeling down to search by “sad” or “sorry”, and see millions of others who share your sentiment. You feel less alone and the world seems smaller, especially when you view the “madness” and see all the particles (which are posts) randomly floating around the screen. Someone in Scotland wrote “I would like to mark that today the 11th would have been ziggys 18th birthday and i have been feeling a bit sad today still missing him so much.” A male in Germany just said “I feel pukey but im not going to” and a female in Palm Springs wrote “I feel fancy.” It is nice to know that love and happiness actually IS happening out there “we have been through a lot together and it is a great feeling to know that we are still great friends;” 24-year old female in San Diego. You can click on the entries and go to each blog if you are so inclined.

Related Links :
http://timecapsule.yahoo.com/
http://www.wefeelfine.org/
http://www.number27.org/