Neat

From Tiffinbox, 10x10--a computer-generated, automatically updated visual representation of 100 major news stories with tiled thumbnail photos. Nice rollover effects. I'm not sure how terriby useful it is, and I'm a little suspicious of the implication of a visual representation of statistical information when the methodology isn't completely clear. The site says it uses RSS feeds of news stories from Reuters, BBC and New York Times International, analyzes them looking for the top 100 words, and then assigns images to those words from the same news stories. It sounds like a computer algorithm chooses the images from the stories, and since they are sometimes only very loosely correlated, the overall tiling of 100 images is less directly informative. For example, right now #42 is "leaders" and the corresponding photo is of some soldiers in Sudan. Colin Powell's face is a representation of both "Bush" and "Foreign."

Nonetheless it's very neat looking and you should take a look. It's a little disturbing how warlike the mosaic is.