Science fiction offers a cornucopia of interfaces and displays - Gibson's interactive video column, Asimov's prime radiant and Jack Vance's celestial armamentarium for the really big picture.
10x10, however, is a futuristic interface you can see right now. 10x10 is a Flash-based news interface created by Jonathan Harris that presents a grid of pictures in the news, each linked to a set of news stories linked by a common topic.
Here's how it works:
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.
So, you can scroll down the sides for a word that looks interesting, or wander among the thumbnail pictures; click on something you like and you are taken to a detailed version of the picture along with the stories that are relevant to that word.
Picture this, that and the other ...
At present, 10x10 gathers its data from rss feeds at Reuters, BBC World and NYTimes International.
... then click on it. Presto, news you can really use.
10x10 is very cool - but what about taking it to the next level? Hmmm... if I could see 10x10 on a virtual display, and then use the CirculaFloor to actually walk to the square I wanted to see more about...
Be sure to go to tenbyten.org - not 10x10.org (draughts).
(This Science Fiction in the News story used with permission from Technovelgy.com - where science meets fiction.)
