Web offering more gauges about happiness

On a happiness scale of 1 to 10, the world scored a 6.16 Monday, according to Emotionr, a Web site that invites users to "store and keep track of your feelings" and "discover what makes people happy." Meanwhile, TweetFeel, which analyzes Twitter posts based on emoticons, words and phrases, showed that on the same day, 101 members used positive language when writing about President Obama, compared with 71 negative comments. With such intangibles as the "nation's mood" increasingly being included among economic indicators, online tools created with the simple purpose of recording Web surfers' feelings are becoming repositories for valuable information of interest to policymakers and marketers alike. Already, services like Google Insights for Search offer marketers the ability to sift through the search titan's vast data to learn how consumers talk about their products, competitors and related searches.