Jonathan believes that despite gender, age, race, religious and other differences, we humans have one thing in common,

a deep need to express ourselves.

However, he points out that

traditionally there is an imbalance between the desire we have to express ourselves and the number of sympathetic friends who are willing to stand around and listen.

Enter the Internet. Now everyone has the opportunity to indulge in their moment of self expression.

His project ‘We feel fine’ scans blog websites for occurrences of the phrases: ‘I feel‘ or ‘I am feeling’ and grabs the sentence in which the phrase occurs. Collecting about 20,000 instances a day,  totalling roughly 7 and a half million feelings to date, it can work out the geographic location, age and gender of the author and from the location and time, can also figure out what the weather was doing when the person wrote the sentence.

The results are represented visually on his website by a series of swarming coloured dots and montage of images presented in a grid. You can click on a dot or image to read the emotion and also visit the website of the originator of the sentence.

You can search by feeling, gender, age, weather and location.  I did a search and found that there were no feelings at all displayed by Irish men in any age group this month, so no surprise there!

Read about the ‘we feel fine’ methodology, movements and click on the ‘Open Applet’ at the top of the page to see the world’s emotions in action.

Let him explain it to you himself in this video from TED.com:

So the next time you discuss your feelings on your blog, you will know that at least someone is listening.