COLORS PROJECT is a project on the Web that records and visualizes feelings of people from all over the world. The project has successfully adopted the weblog by focusing on its characteristics for being a form of an online diary, thus making it a personal medium. Today, weblogs are growing in number on the Internet throughout the world, indicating its significance as a medium that allows people to easily express themselves on the Internet. Interestingly, due to its characteristics, such blog entries often contain words and phrases that express feelings of the writers. Thus COLORS PROJECT has launched under the concept which is as follows:

“If such words were gathered from all over the world everyday, it would give a new insight into human nature. Through looking at a collection of personal activities seen on blogs, something that have not appeared on the mass media, people’s activities or a trend in a larger scale might come to take a form.”

The project is constructed of a system that automatically collects vocabularies that indicate feelings from numerous weblogs using a robotic engine that searches through blogs in the world every 10 minutes which was also specially created for the project. Through the system, the feelings are sorted in 6 categories: impressed, happy, peace, anxious, sad, angry. The vocabularies are recorded on database with the address of the blogs in which the words were found. The amount of blogs that are scanned sums up to a number as close as half a million every day.

The database is then visualized through the COLORS Website. The Website is designed with an appearance of a picture book, having an image of universe and Earth within.

The icons that are shaped as human figures in 6 colors appear on Earth everyday, symbolizing the 6 categories of feelings of the day; at the end of the day, each “person” is transformed into a “star” and rises up in to the universe. The universe consequently is constructed of a record of feelings from the past. All icons, stars and human figured, are clickable to show the vocabularies and links to the original blogs that were captured. The database is also used to show a balance of the 6 colors/feelings on a graph on a daily and yearly basis, which could be browsed on the Website as well.

Moreover, COLORS PROJECT includes not only the Website, but also a system that automatically edits the database into a digest and creates a movie that shows the chronological flow of the generation of the icons and their transformation into the stars.

The project now supports English, Chinese, Spanish, Korean, and Japanese, and attempts on further widening the range of language.

Looking back at the history of media indicates a tendency that a style of media design which accompany the power and influence of the mass media have grown all along the years, despite the history or thoughts of the individuals. What may appear from COLORS PROJECT may seem as a mere collection of everyday activities of nameless individuals with less of an impact. However, we believe that, as small and meaningless as it may appear, the approach having such perspective focusing on the lives of the individuals would turn out to be a significant factor in the informational media technology in the near future. COLORS PROJECT is a recording device created to share such perspective at the ultimate scale: mankind.