10 x 10

“An interactive exploration of the words and pictures that define the time.” With such a bold tagline, you’d think the creator of this Web site was maybe overstating the significance of the product, but he’s not. The simply designed and ingeniously conceived 10 x 10 site is just this: Every hour the site’s program scans the top news stories coming out of three prominent news sources—Reuters, BBC and New York Times—and via “an elaborate process of weighted linguistic analysis on the text” determines what the top 100 most important words are and then lines up a 10-by-10 grid of images that correspond to these top words. The overall result is a rectangular collage of 100 news photos that together form a snapshot of the world at any given hour (you can also click “history” to get a snapshot of any given day or month back to Nov., 2004). The top word/pic/story at 11 a.m., March 11, 2005? “Officials,” with a picture of Donald Rumsfeld standing under the seal of the United States for a story on shipping half the suspected terrorists being held at Guantánamo Bay to prisons in the Middle East.