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."
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
No one has what... Oh nevermind I'm going look at some more pictures now...
There's nothing to read, and yet people will still not RTFA.
// file: mice.h
#include "frickin_lasers.h"
If they could just include some liquor/bar nuts etc., it could be a worthy competitor to my local bar.
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.
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)
I find your ideas intriguing and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.
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!!!
I thought that's what USA Today was for. Some days, reading that paper is like reading a comic book.
The developers must have ADD. I clicked on a picture of Harry Potter and got a story titled "Risque role for Diaz" with a picture of Cameron Diaz and no mention of the boy wizard. I wonder what diverted their attention?
I think that would result in blindness due to a different cause...