One of the things I love most about blogging is the sense of connection with other people - no matter whether I know you or have never met you, whether you live in Australia or on the other side of the world. I love knowing that somewhere out there are people who care about what I write and what I feel, and who make the effort to give me comfort when I need it, or encouragement, or scolding, or support. I hope that in turn my blog gives you some of those things as well.
I just find it completely astonishing that we live in an age where the internet can make connections between people from so far away, different walks of life, different colours and creeds, that we might never hope to meet in our day-to-day lives?
Which leads me to the point of today's post. When I tracked back my stats from Am I Over-Thinking This?, I found some readers who came to that post via a website I hadn't heard of before. It's called We Feel Fine.
We Feel Fine is a database of human emotions, harvested from blogs around the planet. It crawls the web, looking for phrases that use the words "I feel" or "I am feeling", and then it puts those into a searchable database. You can click on other people's feelings, sort feelings by age, gender, location, weather (!), country and year.
It sounds really techy, but BELIEVE ME you MUST log on and have a look. I logged on and found it had pulled out my phrase "I feel almost immobilised by the freedom I've got right now; paralysed by choice".
And then I lost two hours of my life clicking on other links and finding other blogs and reading other people's words. I love it! And I hope you love it too.
2 comments:
I can see why you tracked down your readers and where they came from. Fancy starting an argument over your post. And they probably aren't even sewers. I think I shall try to make sure I keep that little phrase out of my posts. Good that you enjoyed the journey though. Enjoy your hot cuppas and relax. Cherrie
Oh willywagtail how I dearly love your phrase, and how I love to imagine it being uttered with an air of dismissive pity, preceded by a pithy summation of all that is wrong with those who use heartfelt and gorgeously articulated blog entries as a springboard for petty sniping and inconsequential nitpicking; when beyond all of that, on top of all their other human failings, just when there could be almost nothing worse about them.... "And they probably aren't even sewers." I am going to carry that punchline with me for weeks.
But now I should probably skedaddle. Because - whisper it - I am by my own shamed admission not even a sewer. Backing away now, slowly and respectfully...
Oh, but before I do - a direct response to the topic on which I suddenly felt qualified to weigh in, completely and utterly non-sewing-related as it was: Spending 2 hours on a random hitherto unheard-of website? That's the way to embracing unstructured time, right there sister!
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