Creative Lull
Category: Kitchen Sink...
Posted Friday, May 20, 2005 at 11:08 PM [GMT-6]

Some people are energized when they're confronted by multiple projects, each of which seems to demand full creative attention. Not me; I get sullen and crabby.

This has been such a week. Not that I'm complaining; "multiple projects" means money in the bank (however fleetingly) for a free-lancer, but they surely stretch my already fragile creative skills to the snapping point. I've been dealing with new designs or significant updates to five websites (spanning four industries) this week, not to mention another dozen sites that require routine ongoing maintenance. The effort has left me feeling tapped out, and one side effect has been the lack of posts to the Gazette.

But I'm not going down without a fight, so I direct your attention to "10x10 / 100 Words and Pictures that Define the Time". [Update: I've helpfully added an actual link to 10x10 which was omitted in the original post. You guys are so picky!] 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.

This strikes me as a bit prideful and disingenuous. While the mechanics of assembling the final product might be achieved "without any human input," the source material is certainly all human-generated, and from this perspective 10x10 is simply a big visual collating machine. But, still, it's a fascinating exercise, and a nifty bit of design and coding.

Tip o'the hat to Walter over at Psyberspace, via a post containing words that I understand individually but which give me a headache when arranged in the way Walter has cohabited them.

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Comments

Eric,

I'm not sure if you mean to be self-referential but the link for "10X10" in your post points to The Gazette.

I did get to 10x10 via the link to Psyberspace you so thoughtfully provided.

It is pretty nifty. An observation: When I checked, last word was 'feared'. The word 'love' did not appear.

Posted by: Jim at May 21, 2005 08:25 AM
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