Slashdot Mirror
News at a Glance
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."
Of course I could be wrong.
I can't wait till MSNBC changes to a format like that. I can see it now, bill gates 1000x's on my screen just looking back at me with a different pose and look on his face.
Since pitures take more bandwidth than words, maybe they will change it to ASCII pictures next? Talk about a fast news service!
But no I didn't RTFA
It would be much more useful if it adds a short caption/title under the images instead of just the name of the source. I think it is quite good for slashdotters, as most of us don't RTFA. Now we can simply RTFP.
how is that any better than the pictures already at news.google.com ?
Sorry, but it seems something that someone with good scripting abilities can do in a matter of hours.
This paid my last vacation, it mi
A nice feature is it you can get pictures from various country-specific news sources. This is one thing I think news.google.com lacks. I can't do " site:.au" on news.google.com :/
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.
Sounds like /. and PHPNuke category icons system to me. Category icons are even better because you get used to, and remember the pictures, making your browsing even faster.
One area of study had been Repetition Blindness that thinks a person's ability to remember pictures when subjected to many at a time lessens.
This is described as remarkable lapses.
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?
There's nothing to read, and yet people will still not RTFA.
// file: mice.h
#include "frickin_lasers.h"
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.
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."
This site doesn't strike me as being very different from Google News. The only difference seems to be that Google includes short captions for each item, while this one just shows you a picture.
If they could just include some text/descriptions etc., it could be a worthy competitor to google.
My mom never taught me to sign.
Just looking at http://www.news-images.com/1118de/p0-0.htm, you can see the third picture on the right, it's a cooky, yet the page it links to shows "Bundeskanzler Schroeder". In fact non of the "Spiegel" pictures are right.
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?
-- (:> jms cs.vu.nl (_) --"---
This is kinda neat.
/end gripe
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.
I knew the public schools in the USA were bad, but I didn't realize enough people were illiterate that we needed a pictures-only news source. Doesn't anyone read anymore?
Rank Presidents by th
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.
I had no idea what to expect when I read this description; some clarification is in order. This site collects images from news stories & shows them with an often crytic word or random letter pattern underneath for no appparent reason. I saw a picture of Mickey Mouse with the letters itv under it. In fact, most of the pictures said itv under them. I have no idea what this site is supposed to be about because of the awful description; I can't figure it out from the page itself. What does this mean?
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 ....
- this is too few as it is the equivalent of a page with 50 words at the most
...
- this is too few as it means that each topic like Business, Sports,etc is created by stringing 6 words (pics) which does not even begin to capture a headline let alone a summary
....
I think the density of information could be increased here, and we could have many more pics. In addition if the pics are arranged according to some reasonable criteria, even more info can be conveyedTo see a world in a grain of sand, and then to step back and see the beach where the sand lies
except maybe as an art project or something..
.. talking about aids? did they talk about that recently? no it's al-jazeera so must be iraq. okay wasted way to much time thinking about that.
.. a bunch more useless pictures
I literally have no idea what most of those are about. Except for ones that I already read about in the other news. I see:
On the US edition I see:
A guy wiht a beard (arab?)
An illegible blue thing.
two people talking (politicians maybe?)
kofi annan talking angrily (or maybe just the blocky pixels)
two guys
some flowers (somebody die?)
a pharmecutical-looking guy
a blue face
bunch of crap
rush limbaugh getting ready to snort some coke or whatever he does
blah blah
Basically I learned nothing by looking this, I just played a little pattern-matching game wiht what I already new (hey, could this be the green onions that supposedly caused hepitatis in the chi-chis?)...............
on the other hand, they do present information at about the level the average american understands the news.............
People always seem to think that if there's a picture of something then it's the truth, but pictures are actually even easier to use when it comes to twisting the truth to fit your agenda. I don't mean actually editing the picture, but just using it so it fits your goal. Just alter the tagline and it changes a whole perspective. There was a series of ads for a radio statoin here that showed big pictures and would twist them. For example you'd see a bunch of small dots on a desert with fumes behind them so you could ony see they were vehicles and the tagline would read "Military offensive or rally race?"...
We live in an image-based, image-controlled world. I want my news without images, not made out of images.
Maybe they're wherever the profits from the dot-con companies went.
Seastead this.
did you notice the palm 515 review as part of a "headline"? that thing has been out for years!!! there are two pics below... i wonder how they choose their stories, but as far as i am concerned, i will swtick to google news for the time...
I've been addicted to Yahoo's most popular photos for years. It's fun to make predictions on a picture's popularity (if it will go up or down on the list).
Just brilliant. The comicization of news.
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.
I hadn't the slightest objection to his spending his time planning massacres for the bourgeoisie... (P.G. Wodehouse)
What, this is supposed to be /useful/? Aside from the aforementioned lack of context with graphs, the other pictures aren't too helpful either. Here's what I gleaned from a quick look at the site: Arnold Schwarzenegger did something, some guy in a bike helmet did something, a fat dude in a suit sat down.
How this serves as anything other than a mildly interesting diversion is beyond me.
CBC News
Ydco co
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) 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.
Check out this fishy photo by the AFP (Agence France-Presse). It was taken with a wide-angle "fisheye" lens, which distorts the image of the actual scene.
The Newseum has hundrets of digitized frontpages of real newspapers. It's kinda better than that.
* Smile. People will wonder what you think. *
This is perfect for slashdotters. No need to be able to read.
feedster has been doing that for along time. more intelligent i might add, based on images in rdf newsfeeds.
-- for undocumented cisco commands, take a peek @ dotu
This is quite interesting to see that the same people asking for technical papers on IT are rejoicing about the prospect of feeling clever by looking at some non-sense pictures.
/.ers are not discussing more sharply such a decisive issue.
Of course, this is socially gratifying to be able to discuss on a shallow way of roughly every subject on Earth. But when you meet someone that truly knows what he/she is talking about (exactly the same way that people on /. know what they are talking about when it comes to IT), then you are fucked up. It's worth to get involved in a more serious way of learning how our world is rotating.This is exactly what I try to do by visiting this site, and learning from people that are competent on this precise subject.
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 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; 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
Let's overcome our weakness.
The question is not, as you put it, a question of truth or untruth in the pictures. It is not a question of the perception of truth in the pictures, althought that is more important. Nor is the question one of how easily pictures can mislead, as an earlier poster put it.
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 make decisions in. This should be the age when there is more text, fewer pictures.
Representing current events or politics in the visceral fashion that they are in the popular press really does a disservice. I remember when I first saw the 24-hour news channels, and was applauled.. they actually managed LESS insight, less background, less insight, fewer opitions, more bland coverage than earlier TV news.. despite the fact that they had 24 times more air time to show it.
Happily, this website is just a fad.. but it's in exactly the wrong direction.
Doomrat,
Someone who calls himself "Doom Rat" should not be calling other people mentally ill. That is not a name chosen by someone with self esteem.
On the other hand, your point should be considered.
Several years ago, a short piece in The Atlantic Monthly, a respected U.S. magazine, compared Bill Gates to Satan. I'm guessing Satan found that quite annoying.
Others have suggested that Bill Gates and Satan are friends.
Hmmm, let's see what Google has to say... Well, lots of people claim to have proof that Bill Gates is Satan. For example, this article quotes the Bible and uses numerology for the "proof". Some claim to have a photo.
The verdict: Saying negative things about Microsoft and Bill Gates is an obsession, and a widely shared obsession.
Oh wow, it can show 82x60 thumbnails of the news. Maybe this would be cool on my cell phone, if it wouldn't take a year to load.
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
If you're too lazy to read headlines, a new way to find writings might just save your soul.
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...
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!!!
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 agent of change is what is outragous, not just the use of manipuluated images. Using a lens as in this case is a manulipulation of an image just as surely as a photoshop job on an image. Neither one is acceptable.
The press can not become part of the story and then claim to be independent and unbiased as is does on a daily basis. A fact the news media will deny when confronted. It's arrogance that shows how little respect the news media have for it's consumers inteligence.
As you can see I don't care about my karma.
You may want to slashdot this one too. It's even less different from Google News, it just looks better, and it even has a TV mode...
My next comment will be ready soon, but moderators can beat the rush and mod it up early.
I guess we can expect picture dictionaries next
They're using their grammar skills there.
Yahoo! News has a page that shows the 'most e-mailed' news pictures of the day. That page basically uses a sampling of Yahoo!'s visitors as a collaborative filtering team.
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
like when the news shows pictures of fighting in israel. You see either soldiers pointing guns at young people or you see young people throwing rocks. The pictures never shows guns pointed at people throwing rocks or people throwing rocks at people with guns. That's because the story 99.9% of the time takes on side or the other. And if they showed you both sides then the article would not be nearly as effective in changing your opinion.
Bliss!
Slashdot quality declines as the number of hot grits posts decreases. - Provolt's Law, Apr-09-2005
Textz.com News may be of interest as well. It even lets you open the news images in an external window, turning them into a TV program, sort of. Btw, the site doesn't even use the Google API (there is a link to the source code at the bottom of the main page), it's all old-style HTML parsing...
Err, "WARNING, GOATSE LINK ABOVE" or something!
http://www.cardboardutopia.com/commentPics/foShizz y.pl
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 that grabs the headlines and builds a markov matrix out of them and then when you hit the page it randomly generates a new headline and story by iterating over the MM. It rarely makes sense and at best sounds like it was translated by someone that doesn't speak English very well.
There are some odd things afoot now, in the Villa Straylight.
another way americans can actually lower their intelligence. soon instead of people talking about news events, they'll huddle front of a computer screen and grunt.
I concur with most posts that this isn't a really useful source of news, but it is a fun a way to see how up on the news you are. Plus you can check instantly to see if you're right. I get most of my news from the radio so it was refreshing to put a face on the news of the day.
In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice, in practice there is.
Yes, the Department of Defense did release a statement calling these news stories "inaccurate," but they don't deny the connection at all.
Might work for some people but not for me...none of the pictures interested me enough to want me to click on a single link and isnt that what this is all about? chances are if there were captions or a title with the thumbnails i would have clicked at least on one or two articles...right now the old fashioned way (just links without pictures to articles) would be much more efficient in making me actually read any of the articles.
Maybe slashdot could implement this. Instead of submitting a comment, we could just submit a small picture. Of course, the lameness filter would have to exclude the goatse.cx images that would occupy most of the discussions.
People are just easy to manipulate.
7 72 44604.html
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 picture of a top terrorist suspect and identified it as Malaysia's previous Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad.
http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/04/22/10507
It is hard to believe that it was a genuine mistake. Don't tell me that a magazine that calls itself "_Asian_ Wall Street Journal" hires journalists that can't even recognize the heads of governments in the Asian region. Worse it has editors that don't recognize them either.
It's like NYT using a picture of Osama and captioning it as Tony Blair or something like that.
There are more stupid people than smart people.
It is easier to con stupid people. Just distract the smart people with something else while you are at it.
That's how you maintain control.
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=index2&cid=7 02
All photos, click to read.
This reminds me very much of Adrian Veidt's technique of making decisions based on what he sees on a large wall of TV screens set to randomly change channels every few seconds.
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?
Maybe a quote will help:
"First impressions: Oiled muscleman with machinegun, cut to pastel bears, valentine hearts. Juxtaposition of wish fulfilment violence and infantile imagery, desire to regress, be free of responsibility. This all says war, we should buy accordingly"
"But sir, we've never bought into munitions"
"Of course not, you're ignoring the subtext: Increased sexual imagery, even in the candy ads. It implies an erotic undercurrent not uncommon in times of war. Remember the baby boom"
"So we should buy into uh..?"
"Into the major erotic video companies, that's short term. Also we should negotiate controlling shares in baby food and maternity goods manufacturers"
Curiosity was framed. Ignorance killed the cat.
newsQuakes - visual summary of world news overlaid on globe
Visual News - similar to site posted, but with multiple categories including the usefile hot category (hot chicks pictured in today's news ). The "hot filter" is Bayesian filter that automatically seaches for attractive women.
Paradoxically, this site is showing all the pictures found in news and reviews over the Internet.
Um...it's an internet website that shows....PICTURES?!?!?!?! Saying 'it's a news site that only shows pictures, contrary to common expectations of news sites' doesn't cut it, as it doesn't PURPORT to be a regular news site. There's no paradox when a site intended to display news photographs.....does.
http://xkcd.com/386/
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.
--- Ban humanity.
Switch to the US listing, and scroll down to Science and Technology. 6 of 7 pictures are for BioWare's Hordes of the Underdark going gold....
I'm sold on the idea.
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _>8
Too many errors in one post (make fewer).
So, here are the first half-dozen things I tried:
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.
www.sjbaker.org
I thought that's what USA Today was for. Some days, reading that paper is like reading a comic book.
That word -- I do not think it means what you think it means.
I've been watching this site for a while:
Yahoo most popular pictures
It's a collection of the most emailed news pictures. Usually pretty interesting stuff. from cutsey animals, to the Victoria Secret model show.
M@
Krispy Cream is people
What I gather from the current crop of photographs I'm seeing is thus;
;P
George is a chicken
Robocop has arrived to protect and serve
Some dude's hair is bright enough to be a beacon for incoming aircraft
Someone put a random picture of a bunch of kangaroos in here
This guy's glasses don't really suit him very well
And apparently, Bill & Ted are making a comeback...
This information will be very useful indeed, I'm sure.
First, you can see what's hot lately because the same picture is repeated over your screen
Doesn't that just mean that the AD/PR campaign for that particular item has been launched?
spotting a CPU or a japanese robot among other items is almost instantaneous
Why do Japanese robots look different from any other robots?
-T
An image is worth a thousand words (Confucius)
A word is worth a thousand images
Actually, at about 2KB each, their images are worth about 500 (32b) words. If they just cranked the thumbnails up to 10KB each, losing the JPG quantization artifacts, a glance *might* suffice for image recognition.
--
make install -not war
I didn't do anything other than click on the link. But under the section on Local News there was a picture of Jupiter.
That's one hell of a local market.
-T
Thumbnail Post Galleries have been around for years, but this is one of the very few non-pornographic applications of the concept, ever.
I do not deploy Linux. Ever.
Given enough time, I guess everything gets invented. I mean, while it might not have ocurred to me, someone else seems to have come up with a novel idea... an array to tiny colored wicker images.
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.
No one but journalists claim that journalism is about reporting the truth.
Healthcare article at Kuro5hin
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.
Healthcare article at Kuro5hin
Yet it shows what else couldn't have been shown in one photo. However the blurb says a lot about the author's distorted image of the world.
Lars T.
To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck
Unfortunately the person who had our DNS info went out of business and disappeared. So the DNS is in the "grace period"; we should be back up and online Dec. 12th. If you send an email to bigkumquat@aol.com asking for it, kumquat will email you the mp3 you seek!
"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"
Whatever happened to "a picture worth a thousand words"?
There's been a similar service at http://www.bigfrog.net/vnews/ since last year. Feeds are taken from Google News and Yahoo! News. Offers RSS subscriptions and rollovers for the news description. Best part is the Hot Chicks filter. Tries to figure out the hot chicks from all Yahoo! photos using keyword scoring: http://www.bigfrog.net/vnews/hot/.