I'm enthralled by the novel uses people make of open Internet data streams.
10x10 takes news feeds from a handful of global sources, calculates which terms get used most frequently, and builds a 10 by 10 grid of images associated with those terms. Clicking an image gets links to connected stories; the pictures and stories are refreshed every hour. 10x10 has built a history of the images, including doing meta-sets of the most important terms & pictures of the week, the month, and the year.
The method used by 10x10 is noisy, and it's not uncommon to see the same image scattered throughout the grid -- and nearly every picture/term gets connected to stories about different subjects. That said, it's a remarkably compelling way of presenting the news, and has great potential. The 10x10 developers have instructions for using the 10x10 data on other sites, with their own hacked-together apps.
One site I would be interested to see 10x10 matched to NewsMap (which we wrote about originally back in March, 2004), a page which takes the headlines from Google News and creates colored boxes based on how many stories are contained under the headlines -- the bigger the box, the bigger the story. In a quick glance, it's easy to see which stories are capturing the attention of the global media, and (via the shade of color) which ones are rising and falling.
Another interesting connection would be newsQuakes, which takes the location of various headlines and plots them on a world map. NewsQuakes has been around for awhile, and it never quite seemed to me to live up to its potential -- too few headlines, perhaps, or too fiddly an interface. They do provide a lightweight version suitable for WAP devices like Internet-enabled phones, however.
Ultimately, I'd like to see something which would continuously pull news images from a huge assortment of news sites and cluster them by subject; the bigger the pile of images, the bigger the story. Old images would fade to the background and eventually drop off, replaced by new images for the topic or -- if the subject has lost the eye of the media -- nothing at all. That would be a visually intriguing way of watching for the early indicators that something big is happening -- the tremors before the newsquakes, if you will.
(Via Gil Friend)
Comments (3)
A Wired Article featured the artist and other works he has done. http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,66612,00.html
Posted by Dave | May 16, 2005 12:16 PM
Posted on May 16, 2005 12:16
How about augmenting your idea by creating a "3D depth" to it?
A site where you can dive into the depth and past the main stories to see what stories ly underneath. (Stories are layered by importance and media coverage.)
That way one could see how "news bubbles" rise upwards in the media coverage and become "earthquakes" or if they just die away with a slight rumble. (Group the piles in subjects for example with connections inbetween stories like slight hyperlinks.)
Any Thoughts on that?
Posted by Tim | May 16, 2005 11:51 PM
Posted on May 16, 2005 23:51
Send it to Google, they might just do it!
Posted by Dan | May 19, 2005 12:28 PM
Posted on May 19, 2005 12:28