Jan Freeman writes The Word column for Ideas.
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« Burqas vs. Bikinis | Main | Boston is better than New York... » Wednesday, June 27, 2007Web 2.0 materializedEarlier today, I said that what we need at least as much as Web 2.0 visionaries are Web 2.0 handypersons, helpful individuals interested in bringing those of us stranded helplessly in the real world into the virtual world of social networking, user-created content, and so forth. Well, earlier this week Alberto Pepe, a doctoral student at UCLA's Graduate School of Information, did the opposite. He aggregated "emotional and temporal" data from a popular new-ish Web 2.0 website -- FutureMe.org, which allows users to send emails to their future selves, and also to share some of those emails with the general public -- and figured out a way to materialize it in the real world. How did he do it? Pepe explains at his blog: The visualization was performed using data from around 7,000 emails. Emails were sorted by time lag (the time between authoring and delivery of the email) and divided in 99 batches. For each batch, the general "mood" was computed based on the recurrence of selected keywords. Color was used to represent mood: four shades of air balloons, from light pink (sadder) to dark red (happier). The balloons were installed at UCLA in a pattern representing "time lag across space." Sounds complicated, but looks beautiful:  Posted by Joshua Glenn at 08:28 PM
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