Visualize the News
Thanks to Jay for the tip on tenbyten
This cool little application is possible because we are getting more sophisticated about what we put on the world wide web. The internet is playing host to much more these days than simple web pages. In the early days, if you ever looked at the html code you’d see markup (which is the ‘m’ in html) that told your browser how things should look. This text should blink. That text should be 10 pt. Arial font. But these days, people are using markup to not only describe how things look, but what things are. This opens up a whole new world and makes applications like tenbyten possible.
These days, not only can you say that a word or phrase should be ‘bold‘, but you can indicate that the word or phrase is an ‘author’, or a ‘title’, or a ‘date’. If this is done according to a standard, then really cool things are possible. In the case of tenbyten, the standard is called RSS which stands for Real Simple Syndication. When the New York Times, the BBC, and Rueters publish stuff using the RSS standard (meaning that they always identify titles with title markup, authors with author markup, and dates with date markup) then a website like ten by ten can go harvest that information from those sources, analyse it and arrange it in some new way.
This is all part of a larger effort called the Semantic Web. Here’s a definition from the guy who invented the internet:
“The Semantic Web is an extension of the current web in which information is given well-defined meaning, better enabling computers and people to work in cooperation.” — Tim Berners-Lee
Do you get it?
