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."
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 :/
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.
Not really, we've already had TV for years.
I do believe that we will some day move to a more pictorial language where the alphabets will be replaced by pics
I don't. Pictorials alphabets are the equivalent of complex instruction sets, and besides pictures mean different things as you move across cultures. Letters carry less cultural inertia, and are "lighter" -- you can do a lot with only a few alphabets.
It isn't a coincidence that the spare, 26-letter, nearly-unaccented Latin script that English uses is the most popular script is so popular and recognizable -- from street signs in India to the official script of Indonesia (and several other countries).
we will look at cluster of pics to grasp the articles
We already do. The 'pics' are a low-overhead, universally understood set of building-blocks called alphabets. And while I am no Chinese expert, considering the number of "simplifications" and "rationalizations" that have happened in ideographic languages like Mandarin or Japanese, plus the fact that you only need to know ~6000 ideograms to read a newspaper, I would guess they feel the same way.
Go somewhere random
My comment was in context of communication between people and other people, and encompasses more things than just instructional.
I don't mean to denigrate images as a means of communication -- after all, we do have paintings, sculpture -- objects that speak when words fail us.
However, as a way of disseminating news, images suck. What do you make of this image? Is this a guy inspecting a bunch of tanks? Or this? Is this some kind of pervy kiddie porn?
Actually both these pictures are classics, communicating outrage, shock and sorrow -- but they wouldn't if words didn't accompany them and provide context.
Also, letters communicate sparingly and that is why they are used in programming. But there are a lot of people who prefer the GUI IDE even for programming
GUI IDEs make extensive use of text. Perhaps I'm biased towards text because I'm a programmer, but I'd like you to make me a make-like tool using only visual manipulation. IMO, GUIs are useful for tasks involving spatial orientation, but the power of text to communicate complex instructions cannot be beat.
Go somewhere random