Twelve Black Code Monkeys

There is a huge glut of information out there today. Not only do we have the standard news feeds from the news giants like AP, Reuters, CNN, etc., but there are countless web-centric news outlets and of course the millions of blogs that provide RSS feeds.

I think I’ve been news-addicted since high school. One event sticks in my mind from back then – the Challenger disaster in 1986. I was in an art class and someone came in to say the Challenger had blown up. We all thought it was a joke and then the teacher put on a radio and we listened for the rest of class. When I got home I turned on CNN and watched the horrible spectacle for several hours straight. After that Headline News became my background noise. If I wasn’t watching but just wanted the TV on in the background, it was always tuned to Headline News.

Now that the Internet provides me immediate access to all kinds of stuff, I tend to get a lot of my news from Google News. I know you can collect a custom set of RSS feeds via your newsreader, but I’ve found doing so makes me feel like I need to go scan each and every article. In trying to limit the amount of time I spend on this stuff, I find just find browsing through the main Google News page is easier. Sure, I’m letting someone else filter the news for me, but for the moment, that’s ok.

For those who want a little more dynamic access to what’s going on in the world, I recently found out about a couple of sites that display news in a much more graphical way, and I may end up switching over to them eventually myself:

TenByTen.org: This site displays a flash animation consisting of a 10×10 grid of images culled from major news stories from Reuters, BBC, and the New York Times. Because it uses images, you can immediately see which stories are getting the most coverage. Unfortunately it’s not really configurable. You just get any story from just these three sources. You can’t specify categories or search words, and what I’d love is to be able to expand or contract the dimensions of the grid as well as the actual images, which are fairly small on my high-resolution screen.

NewsisFree.com: NewsIsFree has lots of different features that allow you to syndicate news on your site, browse news, and more. What I found most immediately useful (partially because it’s free) is their “News Map” which is a great Java applet that produces a graphical representation of the current news. Although it doesn’t produce images like TenByTen, it does create a kind of color-coded “map” that contains different-sized rectangular areas kind of like a county or district electoral map. You can group articles by popularity or source; you can color code or size by popularity or age. You can also filter for various news categories or individual keywords, and the list of sources is numbers over 100. It’s definitely a potentially very powerful tool for news junkies, editors, and bloggers. Speaking of bloggers, creating a site like this that searched the blogosphere and not the mainstream media outlets would be great – you could discover memes very quickly indeed!