10X10

November 7, 2004 7:32 PM

10 X 10 One Hundred Words and Pictures that Define the Time
posted by ColdChef (11 comments total)

Every hour, 10x10 scans the RSS feeds of several leading international news sources, and performs an elaborate process of weighted linguistic analysis on the text contained in their top news stories. After this process, conclusions are automatically drawn about the hour's most important words. The top 100 words are chosen, along with 100 corresponding images, culled from the source news stories. At the end of each day, month, and year, 10x10 looks back through its archives to conclude the top 100 words for the given time period. In this way, a constantly evolving record of our world is formed, based on prominent world events, without any human input.
posted by ColdChef at 7:34 PM on November 7, 2004

Currently, 10x10 gathers its data from the following news sources:

Reuters World News
BBC World Edition
New York Times International News

damn librul media.
posted by yhbc at 8:16 PM on November 7, 2004

that is cool!
posted by mwhybark at 9:39 PM on November 7, 2004

it is--thanks!
posted by amberglow at 9:44 PM on November 7, 2004

They need some kind of algorithm to eliminate duplicate images. Maybe something that would take the key word and look on google news for an alternate image.
posted by bashos_frog at 11:57 PM on November 7, 2004

They need some kind of algorithm to eliminate duplicate images. Maybe something that would take the key word and look on google news for an alternate image.

I don't know. It's kinda cool to see how often some of the images have been used by various media outlets. It does tend to take away from the look of the project, though.
posted by The God Complex at 1:45 AM on November 8, 2004

Man, if these are the top 100 words/concepts, it speaks to what a bleak time we're livin' in. Beautiful interface, though.
posted by soyjoy at 9:40 AM on November 8, 2004

I'd say it speaks to the kind of thing that's regarded as front page news. Any given newspaper might have features and stories on much lighter subjects, but they likely aren't on the front page, and they likely aren't covered by multiple sources at the same time. It's really only violence and tragedy that captures world attention at any time, no matter how bright or bleak the era is.

On a mailing list I read, someone who writes for music publications was just talking about how he couldn't pitch a story about a band being especially kind and attentive to a sick child to anybody. Not because such stories aren't interesting or printable, but because they're too common. If happy stories are too common to bother printing, the world can't be as bleak as the news suggests.
posted by jacquilynne at 10:08 AM on November 8, 2004

v. nice interface, indeed.
posted by shoepal at 11:29 AM on November 8, 2004

This is a lot of scraping, indexing, and computation in general. It's also some very nice flash programming and xml. But the results are kinda "meh" to me. I just don't see how seeing 100 little thumbnails alongside 100 words (even if they do have a degree of interest function that massages their presentation) really tells me about the news or current events. Since there are many stories that are related, perhaps a pictoral tree-map would be a better choice.

I am, on the other hand, very glad to see the open-source software nature of the project -- the outputs of the scraping and indexing are free for the taking. Use 'em however you want (with atribution), which as an internet kinda guy, makes me very happy.
posted by zpousman at 1:24 PM on November 8, 2004

In a 'news is art' pop-culture way this is very cool.

Thanks for a great link!
posted by geekyguy at 9:40 PM on November 8, 2004