10 x 10

With pleasure, I’ve discovered another utility — called “10×10” — that visually maps the news.

(If you’ve been with me for awhile, you’ll recall my earlier fascination with the Newsmap, which I not only ran and analyzed a bunch of times, but also modified the output to actually make it look like a map.)

According to the 10 x 10 website:

When you open 10×10, you will see a grid of the top 100 world images that hour, ranked in order of importance, reading left to right, top to bottom. Along the right edge of the screen are listed the corresponding top 100 words, one for each image.

Every hour, 10×10 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.

The collection and patterning of images is interesting, but what I actually found most compelling is the list of words drawn from the top 100 news stories (represented to the right of the image, above). Besides the informational value, it also stands alone as a wonderful, continuously regenerating piece of concrete poetry.

Visit 10 x 10

See the “up to the moment” list of 100 words drawn from the the top 100 news stories, here.

(source: blogumentary.typepad.com)