One thing leads to another: I came back from the TED Conference inspired to write some software to find connections between the different TED speakers (something I do manually while listening to each speaker). While looking for concordance software, I stumbled upon DMDigest that led me to the We Feel Fine project.

You'll have to check it out, but basically they have scraped millions of blogs, etc. identifying sentences proclaiming feelings: "I feel..." "I am feeling...". They then go to town on the mining and interface of this, and turn it all into playable art. Mashable art, as it turns out, because they have open APIs. Which got me thinking....

And I threw together the "Theater of Feeling" in Second Life and I've installed it on Clear Ink Island. It's a work in progress as I'm also experimenting with the image and color data served up by the wefeelfine.org people. It's easy to use, but addictive. Just go up and chat "/feel" and a feeling. "/feel good" "/feel lousy" "/feel generous" and see 10 excerpts elaborating on those feelings floating above platforms. Click the platform to go to the source. That's it! But it offers both an insight into what people think they need to share with the world for all time, as well as the mashability of Second Life. Come take a look for yourself.

Oh, and I do feel good about this experiment!

Clear ink is now streaming the live TED Conference into Second Life on our Allston sim. Last night, we had about 60 visitors to the island, watching James Nachtwey, E.O. Wilson, Bill Clinton and a live performance by Paul Simon.

Steve Nelson taught 2 Second Life classes at TED this year. He was joined via Skype and in-world by John Gage of Sun Microsystems. The presentation went well, so I hope we can expect to see some of these "Icons, Geniuses, Mavericks" in Second Life!

If you haven't heard of TED, check out their website HERE

The conference schedule is HERE

The TED build in Second Life is here (or map Allston): HERE