Good web art is a difficult find. Which is why this dude (Jonathan Harris) is so shocking. Prolific in his output and always getting to the heart of whatever phenom he's making art about.

My brother just sent me a link to We Feel Fine

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.

Do I have to explain why that is so spot on and F__ing cool? Moving and non-theoretical. No little sculptures made out of organ meat and spliced genes here, no sir. It's just raw human emotion and the internet.

It even kind of redeems the blogosphere. From being a terrifying self- indulgent outlet for tortured humanity the aggregate starts to seem like the technological equivalent of Siddarthas river of life.