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I saw a demo of these two sites on a TED talk and thought they were pretty cool and worth sharing.
The first is called We Feel Fine and is a site that constantly crawls the worlds web blogs and searches for instances of the phrase "I feel" and grabs the sentence that those words are in. It also grabs the age, gender, location, and current weather conditions of the location where the blogger is. It displays each feeling as a little point of light in this huge swirling mess of lights, different colored lights standing for different emotions. You can click on a ball and read the sentence. You can view this information in all sorts of crazy ways, as well as search with a pretty advanced search function(for instance, all people of a certain age and gender who feel "alive" in the snow). You can even end up linking to the person's blog whose quote you're reading.
The other site is called Universe and was created by the same dude. I'll paste a small description:
quote:Universe is a system that supports the exploration of personal mythology, allowing each of us to find our own constellations, based on our own interests and curiosities. Everyone's path through Universe is different, just as everyone's path through life is different. Using the metaphor of an interactive night sky, Universe presents an immersive environment for navigating the world's contemporary mythology, as found online in global news and information from Daylife. Universe opens with a color-shifting aurora borealis, at the center of which is a moon, and through which thousands of stars slowly move. Each star has a specific counterpart in the physical world — a news story, a quote, an image, a person, a company, a team, a place — and moving the cursor across the star field causes different stars to connect, forming constellations. Any constellation can be selected, making it the center of the universe, and sending everything else into its orbit.
Also with this site you can view the information in countless ways, over different spans of time. each time you click on a word it moves to the center and all the words related to it orbit it. you can then look at pictures, stories, or quotes related to it, and continue browsing. it's also really neat.
I've only played around with each of these a small bit, but I think they're great ideas.
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