The latest evolution of web searches and contextualizing structure (dubbed “web 3.0″) is about the relationships between the trillions of bit of data floating around on the ‘net. Fascinating stuff.

Here’s an interesting way to look up how the web is feeling: We Feel Fine

From their mission page:

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 paints these pictures in six formal movements titled: Madness, Murmurs, Montage, Mobs, Metrics, and Mounds.

Fascinating stuff, actually. You just might get that addicting feeling using this search applet…

(yes I missed 1 day of the NaBloPoMo… sue me )

From CBC’s Ideas radio show, I am listening to the podcast with Nick Maxwell on the ideas about science presented in his book From Knowledge to Wisdom: A Revolution for Science and the Humanities.

So many things to occupy time, so little time for them to occupy.

Here’s an interesting interview I came across with author Salman Rushdie

For the other geeks among us, you might find PC World’s list of the Top 50 Tech Visionaries inspiring.

Here, you can listen to an audio version of a Q&A between Stephen Colbert, Steve Carrell and Ann Hathaway (listen to the audio online by clicking on the link in the middle there).

Lastly, but definitely not leastly, here’s a tribute to the funniest guy who ever lived who died this past weekend, George Carlin. The world was funnier with ya, George, we’ll miss your sick, twisted, brilliant brain. Here he is, in his own words…

Journalist Mark Glaser has an article up on the pbs.org MediaShift blog about the changing face of media in the 21st century. He talks about how both traditional media and new media must learn from each other, and merge the best practices. I like the point he makes about the techno-genie… once it’s out of the bottle, no one can put it back in. We’ve seen the same phenomena with all technological breakthroughs: TV, radio, Film, Nuclear weapons, cell phones, you name it.

No longer do people rely on TV Guide to program their lives around their favorite TV shows. Now they can use a digital video recorder or watch shows on-demand online and fit their TV watching into their lives. The people are taking control and watching, and listening to what they want when they want — and on the devices they want. And that goes for TV as well as radio and audio, with podcasts allowing people to listen on their own time and fast-forward or rewind shows at will.

What do we gain? We get more control of our lives and our media experience and we are no longer slaves to programmers. But what do we lose? We are losing shared experiences, where we all watch the same shows at the same time, or watch the same sporting events together. And our “water cooler” talk has a new etiquette, where we must tell people not to ruin our favorite shows because we’re taping it to watch later!

The Colbert Report has certainly made its influence. Like all intelligent beings, the Internet can also laugh at itself…. check these out:

“Go Outside. Membership is Free.” – www.getafirstlife.com

“Aren’t you tired of all of those people out there trying to grab all of these fake friends online? It’s all about how many people can I pretend to be friends with to make myself feel better. Welcome to a better way…” – snubster.com

“Helping you find where other people aren’t.” – www.isolatr.com

“There comes a time when a student must look beyond the face of things.” – www.assbook.com

“Poking fun at web 2.0 named websites.” – rdiculous.com

“Sites organized in diabolical order.” – yankovic.org

Thanks to Jake Coyle (AP).

This is hilarious!

StoryCorps:

StoryCorps is a national project to instruct and inspire people to record each others’ stories in sound.

Listen to audio interviews in a collection of personal stories. Some real interesting stuff…