can’t make up my mind…

…about these videos.  First of all I discovered them on a site I stumbled across tonight called godtube.com.  Yes it is a ‘christian’ version of YouTube?! Now, why would that be necessary?  YouTube doesn’t prohibit Christian content, I’ve hosted a few there already, “Names of God” and “Jesus of Revelations” for example.  So what is the advantage of using a ‘christian only’ site that is much slower, more US-centric and with less content.

The only thing is that you might feel safe, and that you won’t stumble across something rude.  But then again if you do find something you find questionable on YouTube it can be reported and if ‘they’ agree the content will be pulled.  I just don’t get it.

But back to these videos I can’t make my mind up about.  They are PC vs Mac parody of a Christian vs. Christ follower, now for a start I think that’s the same thing so I’m not sure what they are trying to do.  However, I do like some of it as it is good to laugh at the things we do or see other Christians doing…  see for yourself:

I’m a Christ Follower Part 01

I’m a Christ Follower Part 02

I’m a Christ Follower Part 03

I’m a Christ Follower Part 04

feelings

What would it be like if you could poll everyone on the planet every few minutes to ask them how they feel? Say you then took that information and labelled it with whatever feeling they expressed and perhaps categorised it along with their location, gender, age, etc. and made that information public.

It would then be possible to know how many people felt ‘great’, or ‘sad’, or ‘tired’, or ‘better’ at any one time, or indeed in any one place. You would know which city in the world had the most people who felt ‘silly’ at any one time. This is in effect what wefeelfine.org are doing

“Every few minutes, the system searches the world’s newly posted blog entries for occurrences of the phrases “I feel” and “I am feeling”. When it finds such a phrase, it records the full sentence, up to the period, and identifies the “feeling” expressed in that sentence (e.g. sad, happy, depressed, etc.). Because blogs are structured in largely standard ways, the age, gender, and geographical location of the author can often be extracted and saved along with the sentence, as can the local weather conditions at the time the sentence was written. All of this information is saved.”

The resulting web app is fascinating. Each ‘feeling’ is represented as a dot moving around the screen. Hover the mouse over the dot for a brief description, such as “united kindom kodeyeminster / scared” or “Canada / lost” click on this to get the sentence from the original post and click on that to launch the blog in a new window.

In addition the data can be viewed in different ways, and grouped according to location, weather, feeling, etc. images relating to the posts are grabbed and associated with the feeling mentioned in the post… this is a great little sit, which is somewhere between art, IT and stats.