10 x 10

So, 10 x 10 is a pretty interesting website/blog.

Basically they trawl the web and find the most popular and newest news content represented by a single word and image. It is all then displayed in a 10 x 10 grid of thumbnailed images. When you click on one of the images the top head lines related to the word pop up. It is all refreshed hourly so you can actually track stories and words and see if the gain in popularity or lose it from one hour to the next. It is a a nice visual representation of the news in an easy to use interface. The site defines it self as:

10×10™ (’ten by ten’) is an interactive exploration of the words and pictures that define the time. The result is an often moving, sometimes shocking, occasionally frivolous, but always fitting snapshot of our world. Every hour, 10×10 collects the 100 words and pictures that matter most on a global scale, and presents them as a single image, taken to encapsulate that moment in time. Over the course of days, months, and years, 10×10 leaves a trail of these hourly statements which, stitched together side by side, form a continuous patchwork tapestry of human life.

Each hour is presented as a picture postcard window, composed of 100 different frames, each of which holds the image of a single moment in time. Clicking on a single frame allows us to peer a bit deeper into the story that lies behind the image. In this way, we can dart in and out of the news, understanding both the individual stories and the ways in which they relate to each other.

10×10 runs with no human intervention, autonomously observing what a handful of leading international news sources are saying and showing. 10×10 makes no comment on news media bias, or lack thereof. It has no politics, nor any secret agenda; it simply shows what it finds.

There is also an archive dating back to November of 2004 which let’s you track things on an hourly basis. it is all pretty interesting and definitely worth checking out.