The NY Times Seconds That Emotion
About three years ago, my oldest son introduced me to one of most creative uses of the web I'd seen up until that time, a site called We Feel Fine. The essence of this project is a data collection engine that crawls the web every few minutes "harvesting" human emotions as expressed in any of the millions of blogs containing new posts.
These data are then expressed as an expanding universe of brightly colored circles that appear as a kind of Big Bang of our collective human heart.
Best of all, for media industry execs, you can slice the data by age, place, time, gender, weather, etc., as well as by six categories of emotions. (My personal favorite is the "madness" option.)
There is much more to this site, including a photo gallery, and several useful explanations of the methodologies and technologies used by its creators. So it has always puzzled me, over the years, why this innovative marketing tool did not gain more traction inside media companies, including those where I have worked.
Most of the press coverage the site got seemed to be in Canada, or Europe, or Korea. Some American media did cover it from time to time, but nobody ever seemed willing to copy it.
This all changed on the day Barack Obama was elected President. Suddenly, there on The New York Times homepage, no less, was a text-based cloud of the emotions Americans felt as we elected our first African-American to the highest office in the land (see image).
As it turns out, this creative feat was pulled off by a small team of geeks inside The Times who seem determined to save the faltering newspaper giant by taking the kinds of creative risks that most media companies have yet to embrace.
An excellent New York Magazine article out this week profiles these guys, and demonstrates why there still is hope that the gray lady will adapt to the times soon enough to save The Times.
Meanwhile, a pragmatic note to all managers and aspiring managers: If you have the guts to do so, implement an internal app that allows your employees to express how they are feeling about working for you. In general, I have seen that too many corporate managers, starting at the CEO level on down, under-estimate the importance of utilizing emotional intelligence in the workplace. To me, it's obvious that an employee who feels good, that (s)he is valued, and (s)he has your support remains highly loyal, productive and creative. But an employee who feels undervalued, taken for granted, or worst of all, abused, is probably biding time and circulating his/her resume.
(Note: Thanks to CalTech neuroscience PhD candidate Peter Weir for alerting me to the "We Feel Fine" website back in 2006.)