Tuesday, July 11, 2006

Interesting Numbers

I just found that my blackberry jelly picture has been featured at the gallery of We Feel Fine by Jonathan Harris and Sepandar Kamvar. This is a fascinating site that sort of catalogs expressions of emotion in the blogosphere. They have created a system of "Movements" which reflect trends in emotional expression like "Mob" and "Murmurs" (only 2 or the 6 Movements). The data is collected and sorted by an autonomous system with no human involvement at all. I find some of their statistical findings very interesting:



4,003,906 TOTAL FEELINGS COLLECTED

937,753 TOTAL UNIQUE PEOPLE

185,664 FEELINGS from 243,873 UNIQUE WOMEN

267,977 FEELINGS from 107,696 UNIQUE MEN


These numbers are as of about 11 am Eastern. These numbers surprise me, but I'm not sure if I'm just looking at them wrong. Unfortunately, I've been unsuccessful at opening the main part of the site. Any interpretations of this data are welcome.



Unrelated but a trend I've noticed in the last week or so is that my Tree of Life post has been getting lots of traffic from all over the world, and about half of the hits are from "unknown" referrals, meaning that a search engine or other link from a website wasn't used to find it. The other half have been referrals from searches for songs about lemons. I find it odd and interesting when something that has been on my mind is also on the minds of other people somewhere else in the world. It's neat. There is still a steady stream of visitors to my Mary Winkler posts, but that does not seem too significant because that is a big news story unlike lemon trees.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hi Rae Ann!

Presently, the Reference Frame is becoming too hot for me to handle. I thought I would stop by and cool off in your more relaxing site. I feel the air-conditioner coming on now...

Back on topic: men may be more emotion; however, they are better at hiding it.

Have an enjoyable evening!

Thanks,
Cynthia

Rae Ann said...

Cynthia, welcome! I'm so glad you stopped by for a little Southern comfort. ;-) Don't let the "vicious momma" thing worry you. I'm much more 'momma' than 'vicious.' It's usually pretty relaxed here, though there have been moments of excitement. Kick off you shoes and cool off!

Rae Ann said...

Oh, yeah, and about men and emotions, heh. I really have struggled to make sense of those numbers from We Feel Fine. Do you think it's a minority of men who express all of those emotions? That must be the answer, and we must not be hanging out with those expressive ones. ;-)

Anonymous said...

Emotional men are so 80's and emasculated.

Rae Ann said...

dh, I can't disagree there for the most part. I really didn't 'get' the appeal of the Alan Alda type. Yuck! But it is nice when a man isn't afraid to express his emotions, that is if he can even recognize them. ;-)