News at a Glance 173
chris writes: "If you're too lazy to read headlines, a new way to find writings might just save your soul. Paradoxically, this site is showing all the pictures found in news and reviews over the Internet. Nothing to read there, just thumbnail galleries sorted by theme (with, of course, links to the original articles). This format is showing some interesting side-effects. First, you can see what's hot lately because the same picture is repeated over your screen. It is also very effective when looking for reviews of tech toys or computer gizmos... spotting a CPU or a japanese robot among other items is almost instantaneous. Another thing to notice is that pictures of human faces seem to keep the lead over pie charts and battlefields... they are a good clue to figure what an article is about."
No one has ADD that bad... (Score:1, Funny)
Re:No one has ADD that bad... (Score:3, Funny)
Re:No one has ADD that bad... (Score:1)
Re:No one has ADD that bad... (Score:2, Funny)
The future of news (Score:2, Funny)
Since pitures take more bandwidth than words, maybe they will change it to ASCII pictures next? Talk about a fast news service!
Re:The future of news (Score:2, Funny)
You must not have seen CNN Headline News lately.
The left third of the screen is covered with a mundane graphic, normally with at least 3 different fonts. Bonus: If you can devise a way to say "Operation Iraqi Freedom" using 6 or more typefaces, you are CNN producer material!
The bottom half of the screen is covered with a combination weather forecast/newsticker. Receive pictorial weather conditions for every city but your own! Not to mention the ticker,
Re:The future of news (Score:2)
Re:The future of news (Score:2)
Or maybe my memory's cloudy and it sucked ass. I wasn't exactly old enough to tell the difference at the time, back then.
The future of News for Nerds (Score:1)
May be a little Obvious (Score:4, Funny)
Re:May be a little Obvious (Score:5, Funny)
RTFP (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:RTFP (Score:5, Interesting)
In the current layout, you still have to skim through it, and only get a handful of images... so you might as well just go to Google News or Drudge Report or something for your news links.
Re:RTFP (Score:1)
Now we can simply RTFP.
er...that should be STFP.
Now that we've got that cleared up, i think i can STFU
Re:RTFP (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:RTFP (Score:1)
You give us too much credit.
I, for one, will not read any slashdot article or picture. Ever.
Re:RTFP (Score:3, Interesting)
Another interesting news experiement is memigo.com [memigo.com]. It's a meta-news site, like Google News, except it uses an Amazon.com-like algorithm to predict the news stories that you will want to read.
It's a clever idea, but the stories get a bit repetitive after it learns your preferred news topics. I think the algorithm should include a few more random and underrated links.
so... ? (Score:5, Insightful)
Sorry, but it seems something that someone with good scripting abilities can do in a matter of hours.
Yahoo has been doing this for years... (Score:5, Informative)
All photos, click to read.
Per-Country (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Per-Country (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Per-Country (Score:4, Informative)
So Google didn't miss it out, they just didn't stick the links up at the top so people with the attention span of a gnat wouldn't miss them...
Re:Per-Country (Score:2)
Like Ozymandias in WATCHMEN (Score:5, Interesting)
Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons created a superhero, Ozymandias, in their 1985 graphic novel WATCHMEN. He had a huge wall of TV screens that showed the whole world's channels, each screen switching randomly every few seconds. Being incredibly intelligent, he could divine the state of the world through these Burroughsian blipvert glimpses, like a prophet reading entrails. This page reminded me of Ozymandias.
Re:Like Ozymandias in WATCHMEN (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Like Ozymandias in WATCHMEN (Score:1)
Re:Like Ozymandias in WATCHMEN (Score:2, Informative)
"Increase of sexual/erotic imagery. Indication of imminent war." It's in the book.
Re:Like Ozymandias in WATCHMEN (Score:2, Informative)
http://www.unc.edu/~faint/jamesrandirespondstoa
Look at the picture of Alan Moore and then try to help me answer the question - just who does Alan Moore think he is?
Re:Like Ozymandias in WATCHMEN (Score:1)
Well, I
Re:Like Ozymandias in WATCHMEN (Score:2)
He's not really anti-science, at least not that much. It's not like he's claiming that magic is "real", he's just decided to take the stance that, as a human, who live just as much in their imaginations as in the real world, magic and t
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Browse news by looking at it's image (Score:3, Interesting)
Repetition Blindness (Score:4, Interesting)
This is described as remarkable lapses [mq.edu.au].
They also describe how people cannot tell subtle shifts in scenes.
A neat way of looking at the news, but I wonder how much is missed?
Re:Repetition Blindness (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Repetition Blindness (Score:5, Funny)
I reject that suggestion. If that is true, then explain to me why one can view heaps and heaps of pr0n and still recognise individual pictures as dupes in a database of, oh, 21Gigabytes worth. (I'm speaking on behalf of a friend, of course)
Re:Repetition Blindness (Score:2, Funny)
Here on /. (Score:4, Funny)
Thought association (Score:4, Insightful)
The first thing this reminded me of was this quote by George Orwell:
"If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face
forever."
Not very different from google news (Score:4, Insightful)
If they could just include some text/descriptions etc., it could be a worthy competitor to google.
Re:Not very different from google news (Score:3, Funny)
If they could just include some liquor/bar nuts etc., it could be a worthy competitor to my local bar.
Re:Not very different from google news (Score:2)
What I'm suprised about is that nobody has mentioned it *is* a rip-off of Google News:
e.g.:
"International versions of Google News available in:
Australia - Canada - France - Deutschland - India - Italia - New Zealand - Espana - U.K. - U.S."
-- <http://news.google.com/>
vs:
"All editions U.S. Canada U.K. Espana France Deutschland Italia India Australia New-Zealand"
-- <http://www.news-images.com/>
This one is even less different from google news (Score:2, Informative)
Re:This one is even less different from google new (Score:2)
-T
Re:This one is even less different from google new (Score:2)
-T
Pictures of "Der Spiegel" (Score:2, Interesting)
Maybe "Der Spiegel" has some kind of protection against using images outside their site?
If I am correct, some (most?) warez and porn sites have this kind of protection. But a paper? Why?
Re:Pictures of "Der Spiegel" (Score:1)
Maybe "Der Spiegel" has some kind of protection against using images outside their site?
Shouldn't there be a way to get around this?
I saw another example of an incorrect thumbnail. The wrong image was grabbed. It was an ad picture.
Kinda neat (Score:2)
One of the things that I get annoyed at when reading news is when they don't include a picture for an article that obviosly calls for one.
One example is last year there was a big story about a man who found a multi-acre field completely covered in a huge spider web. Yet they didn't bother give us a picture.
You mean these pictures? (Score:3, Informative)
We're doomed (Score:1, Funny)
Re:We're doomed (Score:4, Insightful)
50 thumbs on a page is too few ... (Score:4, Interesting)
I do believe that we will some day move to a more pictorial language where the alphabets will be replaced by pics ... (no, we will not all be chinese then though chinese has 10-20,000 pictorial characters)
and just like we look at combinations of alphabets to grasp words, and combinations of words to grasp phrases, and combinations of phrases to grasp paras ... we will look at cluster of pics to grasp the articles ....
Looking with that analogy, 50 stock thumbs means that we could either look at it as 50 alphabets on that page, or if there is a little caption beneath the pic, then there are an equivalent of 50 words on that home page ....
Re:50 thumbs on a page is too few ... (Score:2, Interesting)
Nah seriously, try and explain your ideas in your pictogram style, you cant. Further, William Gibson predicted an over-use of "infographics" (like the man and the woman on the toliet doors) to the extent where there would be an overload and people would just stop bothering. (his was in relation to the net, his reasoning why we will go to a 3D net over infographics - which is still
Re:50 thumbs on a page is too few ... (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't. Pictorials alphabets are the equivalent of complex instruction sets, and besides pictures mean different things as you move across cultures. Letters carry less cultural inertia, and are "lighter" -- you can do a lot with only a few alphabets.
It isn't a coincidence that the spare, 26-letter, nearly-unaccented Latin script that English uses is the most popular script is so popular and r
Re:50 thumbs on a page is too few ... (Score:3, Insightful)
I am ass
Re:50 thumbs on a page is too few ... (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't mean to denigrate images as a means of communication -- after all, we do have paintings, sculpture -- objects that speak when words fail us.
However, as a way of disseminating news, images suck. What do you make of this image [leeds.ac.uk]? Is this a guy inspecting a bunch of tanks? Or this [rense.com]? Is this some kind of pervy kiddie porn?
Actually both these pictures are classics, communicatin
Re:50 thumbs on a page is too few ... (Score:2, Insightful)
Already done but forgotten: Egyptian hieroglyphs
What's in a Sig ??
Re:50 thumbs on a page is too few ... (Score:1)
Unless, of course, you're blind or near blind, at which point 50 slow-to-load, blurry or invisible pictures becomes hundreds of even slower-loading, blurry or invisible pictures.
Or are you volunteering to start www.text-descriptions-of-news-pictures.com?
Re:50 thumbs on a page is too few ... (Score:1)
Think about a very simple "picture", the smiley.
Different people interpret them as meaning different things.
My girlfriend uses
If such a simple image means so many thing to different people, how will it work for more complicated images?
Cheers,
Roger
Re:50 thumbs on a page is too few ... (Score:2)
For one, how are people supposed to write in your "pictoral language"? Draw? Speak, and the computer does it for them?
Your language works similarly to hieroglyphics, in which characters can stand for either the things they physically represent (a fish), a combination of letter sounds ("swnw", [hieroglyphics has no proper vowels, we add them in to pronounce things like "Soonoo"]), a grammatical construction (this word is a noun!), or a syntax
Re:50 thumbs on a page is too few ... (Score:2)
Actually, with all the specialized 'jargon' picts, Chinese has in slight excess of 40,000 characters.
Images are even easier to manipulate than words. (Score:5, Interesting)
We live in an image-based, image-controlled world. I want my news without images, not made out of images.
Re:Images are even easier to manipulate than words (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Images are even easier to manipulate than words (Score:1, Insightful)
The news is supposed to "influence public opinion" and "stimlate change" not report the facts so you make your own informed judgment.
That is the "purpose" of the news media according to members of it.
You have to make pictures to fit your facts, not pictures that represent the facts. How else can you stimulate changes that are supportive of your agenda what ever that unannounced agenda may be.
The fact that the press has self appointed it self as the source of facts and truth and as an
Re:Images are even easier to manipulate than words (Score:2)
No one but journalists claim that journalism is about reporting the truth.
Re:Images are even easier to manipulate than words (Score:2)
Re:Images are even easier to manipulate than words (Score:2)
One common method is to get quotes from lots of people, and then select quotes according to your agenda, and voila instant fact based news article.
And another is by association- because Bush regularly mentioned Saddam and Osama together, and linked both Saddam and Osama to the same category (War against Terror), many of the US people think that Saddam was significantly involved with 9/11.
As for images, it is rather telling that the Asian Wall Street Journal ran the pict
TopCoder Pictures Tell Their Own Story (Score:1, Offtopic)
Maybe they're wherever the profits from the dot-con companies went.
outdated crap? (Score:2, Insightful)
Yahoo! Most Popular Photos (Score:2, Interesting)
This Is Brilliant! (Score:1)
The mass production of comics -as in non-pop-art- is considered an exponent of American decadency by most cocky Europeans. Comicization of news is mass produced comics at its finest.
I'm European and I already love it.
Re:This Is Brilliant! (Score:1)
They're Grapic Novels not Comics - a serious art form which is bringing mainstream culture to a new generation. Todays youth is not restricted by the previous generations' inability to parse multiple data sources in quick succesion and is free from the straight jacket linear processing of redundant text.
Witness the phenomenal sucess of the Graphic Novelization of War And Peace - 10 pages of beautiful pictures which are now part of our global gestalt, there can be argument that fr
So? (Score:2, Insightful)
How this serves as anything other than a mildly interesting diversion is beyond me.
Works great! (Score:5, Funny)
Usually I have to lurch past interminable murders and battlefield pics to get to some maybe-already-read science story at the bottom of the page (on cnn).
But with this it was easy. I clicked on Top Stories more.. and skip the photos which I don't know what they are. Right away I see my two choices, what seems like a gorgeous tanned piece of royalty in a crimson and silver dress, or a stressed out techie on the phone. Hmmm, which should I pick? It's over in a microsecond and obviously everyone else here is making the same decision since the story (Halle on her Disastrous Love Life [mirror.co.uk]) is slashdotted. But the theory works. I don't know who the heck Halle is but now I want to know and save her from a bad boyfriend too!
I would even go for fewer thumbnails about 5 times the size of these and scrap the ones with bad pictures. That way we could see the news before it gets slashdotted. Next we'll evolve to networked torrents of femmes fatales (girls you pick hommes fatals or whatever you like). It is so much easier to make a decision without all those pesky letters they give me so much eyestrain anyway.
Better see the whole newspages (Score:3, Interesting)
feedster (Score:1)
Which representation of knowledge ? (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm not going to discuss about the strength of the immediate impact of a very intuitive and emotional object, ie a picture, a photography. I think history gave us some very interesting examples of misuse of information through pictures, videos, etc. My main point is that we should be careful, because our relationship to visual stimuli are not that rational ; you can go there [bostonreview.net] if you want to learn more about the debate on the power of pictures, and what they really represent in our society.
Our world is by now so complex, so wide-open, that only strong and addictive stimuli can catch our attention. This is not surprising that the story of pictural representations is tightly related to the complexification of the world we're living in right now.
Thus, I have such an admiration for photographers such as James Nachtwey [seven-photo.com]; what the folks like him did and still do is all the more useful than everyday brings a little more sadness to our daily lives.
But in no manner they represent - and themselves acknowledge it frankly - the truth. Because the truth is not in a picture, nor it is in a series of pictures. Photographers are here to draw our attention to urgent, revolting, funny, clever, ie interesting subjects. But I hate nothing more than people going to see Rwanda's genocide exposition in a museum, and then coming back with the so good-conscience feeling about the fact that yes, they did something, and what's more, they understood the problem.
Pictures are a beginning. I see a beautiful -yes, beautiful- picture of kids starving in Ouganda, my first reaction is to take some time and read papers about it. If I have some interest in Africa's demise (yes, yes, you'll see that in some time, the Southern part of Africa will be empty of black people), and if I have some time to spend on that, I'll read very different papers. Read NGO reports on the subject. Try to understand how I can be of any help. Etc. etc. etc.
A site that is supposed to make you understand the whole international actuality with pictures and snippets is the best way, first to make Ignorance's realm all the more important, and second to encourage, indeed, lazzyness. I don't even see why
And this is really what a responsible citizen should do with the general purpose information.
Regards,
Jdif
How stupid can we make it? (Score:2)
The basically offensive thing about this is that it even further reduces the simplification of the news (or even of thought in general). We ARE living in a complex world, and complexity requires deep and subtle thinking to navigate and ma
Useless (Score:1)
But seriously, a site like fark is a thousand times more useful than something like this. And they have forums!
Also, what's up with all the aljazeera links on that site?
- Cary
Laziness (Score:2)
If you're too lazy to read headlines you're probably not interested in finding "writings". On the other hand, if one really is interested in these writings you speak of perhaps the headlines will be of more use, especially when some of the pictures are the faces of the columnists who produced said writings.
a picture is worth a thousand words.... (Score:4, Funny)
the pictures(images) on the site are around 1 kb which is about 1000 bytes which is about one thousand words
hence a picture is really word about a thousand words!!
1. make 1 kb sized images and substitute for long news articles
2. save bandwidth
3. ???
4. profit!!!
what's next? (Score:1)
See also Yahoo!'s "Most E-Mailed Pictures" page. (Score:2)
You can guess which pictures are the 'most e-mailed' ones: media/newsmakers, accidents/catastrophes/war, cute fuzzy animals, human freaks, and, of course, cleavage.
-Mark
Full circle (Score:2)
Bliss!
Another interesting site... (Score:2, Informative)
I get my news slightly differently (Score:1)
This page picks up the news images off of Yahoo and Reuters, then it grabs headlines off of Yahoo, and then also grabs feedback off of randomly generated users on Ebay.
Then it randomly combines the images.
I don't follow the news much, but this helps me - sure the things don't usually go together, but they are amusing and you can still get an idea about what is going on.
There is also the news generator page [cardboardutopia.com] that grabs the headlines and builds a mark
It's a current event quiz. (Score:2, Interesting)
U.S. == Rush and Fox (Score:2)
Yes, the Department of Defense did release a statement calling these news stories "inaccurate," but they don't deny the connection at all.
Anyone read Watchmen? (Score:2)
By looking at the overall average of the concepts expressed in real time he estimates the moods of the markets and the population.
I always thought this was an interesting concept, and quite possibly had some potential - to extract useful information out of a kind of aggregate of real time noise. Am I making any sense here at all?
Ma
Other news sites for people with attention deficit (Score:1)
Visual News [bigfrog.net] - similar to site posted, but with multiple categories including the usefile hot [bigfrog.net] category (hot chicks pictured in today's news ). The "hot filter" is Bayesian filter that automatically seaches for attractive women.
Say what? (Score:3, Insightful)
Wait... only reading the headlines is what lazy people do. That's why 99.9% of humanity lives in near complete ignorance.
To be too lazy to even read headlines you have to be, like, in a vegetative state or something. Headlines are your least concern. Somewhere there's a family member looking to pull the plug on you.
I'm not impressed. (Score:4, Informative)
1) A picture of a donut in the Science/Technology section. Links to a story about the record breaking sales of the Finding Nemo DVD??!? So, wrong image *and* wrong category.
2) In the Business section, a photo of some diamonds with a link to a story about Ukrainian diamonds! Hooray! Unfortunately, the next four (unrelated) photo's in the business section point to the exact same article.
3) Even when I selected the "US" edition, the top three entries in "Top Stories" were links to articles in German.
4) The next photo in the Science/Technology section linked to an advert for some video game or other. Not what I'd describe as news.
5) Local News (remember I have 'US' selected). The first three items are in Spanish. If these were stories about the US or maybe Mexico - for Mexicans - maybe I could understand that - but these appeared to be about Spain and were obviously 'Local' stories only if you happen to live in Spain!
6) Clicked on the first photo in the Health section - got a broken link.
Deeply unimpressive.
News via Images? (Score:3, Funny)
Re:News via Images? (Score:2)
Paradoxically? (Score:2)
Yahoo pix are good (Score:3, Informative)
Yahoo most popular pictures [yahoo.com]
It's a collection of the most emailed news pictures. Usually pretty interesting stuff. from cutsey animals, to the Victoria Secret model show.
M@
Mistaken assumption (Score:3, Insightful)
Doesn't that just mean that the AD/PR campaign for that particular item has been launched?
That's some Local news (Score:2)
That's one hell of a local market.
Colored Wicker Squares (Score:2)
The fun here is trying to figure out what each picture is depicting. Is that a man with a Sears washing machine on his head, a computer part, or a backhoe. Oh, the hours of joy this bring me.
Needs some ironing to get out the bias (Score:2)
When I clicked on the "U.S." link at the top, every picture in the Science/Tech section was of a Mac, Mac OS X, or something else from Apple. Not just some pictures, every picture.
Like there isn't anything else interesting in the US.
Re:Have you seen goatse recently? (Score:1, Offtopic)
Err, "WARNING, GOATSE LINK ABOVE" or something!