Web 2.0 Watch

Stay in the know with Web 2.0

When I'm not blogging, I'm eyeballs deep running marketing at Keynote. If you’ve ever worked at a small company, you know the hours that create that bleary-eyed look.  It’s fascinating work that we do but let me tell you, it doesn’t leave much time to keep up with the outside world.

And I don’t just mean the sound bites served up about where the stock market closed -  I mean what’s really happening out there.

So this week I’m going to let you in on a little secret – it’s a site I use to keep up.

Check out 10x10. 

10x10 is an amalgamation of information created by a young artist – and really only someone who dwells in the visual world could create this site.

Here’s how 10x10 works: it chooses the top 100 words and pictures in the world every hour and depicts them visually in a square box on your screen.  By selecting an image (or word if you’d rather) you automatically load top stories related to that word.

On the day I’m writing this I selected an image of a child and was presented with the associated word and related articles in that moment in time:

DARFUR
1. Aid workers quit Darfur violence
2. West ups calls on Sudan to accept Darfur troops

When I selected #1, a new browser window opened and took me to this article on the BBC Web site.

In a matter of seconds, I learned that 250 aid workers have been taken out of the area due to personal security concerns, impacting 500,000 displaced people in the region.  I know I wouldn’t have gotten there just by trolling the news sites.

But that’s not all.  10x10 also allows you to go back in history – all the way back to 2004.

I randomly selected February 2, 2005, 12AM EST (U.S. time zone) and then picked word 56 “Indian”.  Here are the headlines I got:

1. Indian close to Jordan F1 drive
2. Nepal King Names New Cabinet After Sacking Govt
3. Tourism plan agreed after tsunami
4. Malaysia suspends migrant sweep
5. Nepal's King Ousts the Government and Declares an Emergency

An Indian national in Formula One racing – cool! I had no idea.

Is this amazing or what? No I meant the site.

10x10 renders its interactive interface entirely in Flash – and it’s fast to load, fast to select and fast to search history. 

Behind the scenes, the site is pulling RSS (real simple syndication) feeds from 3 global news sources and the doing some kind of semantic analysis, parsing the text and then clustering most popular words into categories.  Perl and PHP are used for the parsing and then stored in MySQL

Images are similarly pulled from these news sources and associated with the word categories.  All images are .jpg. 

10x10 doesn’t replace news Web sites but it makes understanding and accessing our world of data so much easier.

Some from down under

It's everywhere. Web 2.0 in Australia brings us a very artistic way to connect. It uses the idea of creative collaboration to get you talking.

Check out "the broth".

It'll take a few moments to figure out what's going on. Mosaics? Tiles? A map (courtesy Google) of players around the world? What kind of game is this?

Then after taking the quick video tour (courtesy YouTube) you'll say - wow, this is pretty neat. An entire site built around creating art.

After clicking on the confirmation email, you'll be sucked right in. There are multiple ways to start creating your own masterpiece. You can join an existing "active room" or create your own. If it's public, then others can join you as you work.

All the while, you'll be able to chat in the side window as you see your collaborators picking up new tiles, moving them across the screen, and assembling them on the digital canvas.

In my first experience I met a fashion designer from New Zealand, killing some time at 5PM her time, before heading out for dinner. She was kind enough to give me a lay of the land but in return, unfortunately, she got a pretty poor collaborator. You would think assembling tiles on a screen would be easy enough - and it is. But making it look good is a different matter entirely.

If you've got the talent, you can enter the competitions and win some nice prizes.

The technology behind this was seamless – AJAX and PHP. The experience is really great – and wow, fast as a cheetah running after lunch. Creating new galleries was easy and I loved the interaction with someone on the other side of the planet.

And if you go, they tell me you gotta check out the art work of GOGO or BRRRFrost - they are the best.