If you have plenty of time on your hands, go visit the rather too fascinating We Feel Fine. In a rather scary computers-will-take-over-the-world way, this site has been set up to check out how people are feeling on a mass scale and portray it in a most artistic, if slightly voyeuristic, way.

The art of blogging has never been more popular what with everyone and their dog owning their own web domain, and even if not there are numerous hugely-popular services like MySpace and Blogger. Every few minutes We Feel Fine sends its web bots to scan through new entries people have made to their online journals, in which many people publish their deepest thoughts and emotions, to search for phrases like "I feel".

When such a phrase is found, the surrounding sentence is scanned automatically to see if it can be said that the author was feeling one of 5000ish pre-chosen emotions. If so, the sentence is recorded in the database.

Furthermore, many blog sites are predictable enough in structure that the system can look up the author's public profile. This may allow it to establish the gender of the writer, where they live, the weather, their age and so on. It may find photographs. All this information is recorded.

Madness in actionWe Feel Fine then produces a variety of digital arty stuff to let you freely explore its findings. When you first log on, you are presented with "Madness". Here, each person's emotional state is represented by a dot, coloured to represent the "tone of the feeling". As they swim away in virtual darkness, you can click on the ones of you choosing to see what that person was feeling at the moment in time they wrote their online diary. "Murmurs" scrolls the sentences themselves up randomly.

Other modes exist to show any photographs it may have found associated with each feeling. Furthermore because it attempts to collect the demographic information, the tools are there to cross-compare various data, to ask questions like are older people happier than younger, does rain make people sad, are men or women angriest, and so on. Whether this of academic-level interest the Poorhouse is not qualified to say, but it is fascinating to play with.

Sadly, despite the name of the site, it turns out that there are plenty of people not feeling fine.