Getting it together

I just found some amazing tools on the web. Daytum lets you record stuff you do everyday and generates statistical analysis of your habits, activities or feelings - there's even an app for it.

Then there's we feel fine (www.wefeelfine.org). This is an automated web trawler that looks for the phrases '... I feel ...' and '... I am feeling ...' on blogs, records the sentence the phrase appears in and then analyses the blogger for

• Feeling (happy, sad, depressed, etc.)
• Age (in ten year increments - 20s, 30s, etc.)
• Gender (male or female)
• Weather (sunny, cloudy, rainy, or snowy)
• Location (country, state, and/or city)
• Date (year, month, and/or day)

You get an applet that lets you sample the data collected. There are 5000 'valid' feelings, each is assigned a colour.

But the best thing I came across is Ushahidi - meaning testimony in Swahili. Developed in Kenya during the disturbances after the 2008 elections, Ushahidi is a non-profit tech company that develops free and open source software for information collection, visualization and interactive mapping. Anyone with a digital connection can upload information, photos and videos through sms, mms and email about a developing situation. A fantastic use of crowd sourcing. The information is then sorted and collated both digitally and by hand, and fed back into a graphical representation of the events in real time - commonly onto a map where contributors can see their information helping to make sense of often chaotic developments. I love it. You can download the software to apply to conditions in your own area. They encourage people to volunteer to help develop the idea. See http://www.ushahidi.com