Interesting site - scans RSS feeds for top stories & images (10X10)

[Webster Green]

I was looking at sites that won Webby Awards in 2005, and found this one. No doubt there are other news/political junkies here that might appreciate this...

Process:

Every hour, 10x10 scans the RSS feeds of several leading international news sources, and performs an elaborate process of weighted linguistic analysis on the text contained in their top news stories. After this process, conclusions are automatically drawn about the hour's most important words. The top 100 words are chosen, along with 100 corresponding images, culled from the source news stories. At the end of each day, month, and year, 10x10 looks back through its archives to conclude the top 100 words for the given time period. In this way, a constantly evolving record of our world is formed, based on prominent world events, without any human input.

http://tenbyten.org/index.html

[bluerum]

1. Any automated analysis like this needs to be considered with

a healthy skepticism. I find it fascinating but when writes the rules one has an impact on the outcome.

How many times does the word "the" appear on the front page of a newspaper?

I know that any "intelligent designer" would eliminate this word from the search of 100 top words - but what other words are excluded - and what words are allowed to be included - and how do they make those linguistic decisions? What are the weighting rules? Or am I missing something obvious in linguistic studies of this type?

"
In this way, a constantly evolving record of our world is formed, based on prominent world events, without any human input.
"

Its kind of like writing voting machine software.

:wtf:

[boobooday]

2. That is WAY cool

Thanks for posting it!

[rpgamerd00d]

3. The site is corrupt. Its not filtering enough.

It has "Slobodon" ranked separately from "Milosovic", separately from "Milosovics" (plural).

Its mostly crap (fox, un, al, died), or the obvious (Iraq, President, Bush, Hamas)

They have a long way to go with their "neural net", so to speak.