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."
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?
In the current layout, you still have to skim through it, and only get a handful of images... so you might as well just go to Google News or Drudge Report or something for your news links.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
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 (_) --"---
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
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.
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).
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 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.
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.
Another interesting news experiement is memigo.com. It's a meta-news site, like Google News, except it uses an Amazon.com-like algorithm to predict the news stories that you will want to read.
It's a clever idea, but the stories get a bit repetitive after it learns your preferred news topics. I think the algorithm should include a few more random and underrated links.
cpeterso