In the multimedia show / lecture series ‘Het einde van Nederland in 12 stappen’ van ‘Rob en de rebellen’, Lotte Meijer had a talk about someone committing suicide because he didn’t receive enough smiles. Rob and Lotte asked everyone to smile more, also at strangers. That really moved me. I generally do smile a lot, also at strangers, and then I see them lighting up. I remembered an old poem I read - the one you see next to the picture, and came up with the idea of making a script that would fetch a random smile from Flickr. The original idea was to make a mailinglist that would send out a fresh smile each morning. This way you would be reminded to smile today and spread some positive vibrations throughout the world. If there is a demand for it, I will implement that feature. But for now there is this page.

While implementing the script I thought other nice things could be done with the same principle so I made this page. Feeding it with the tags ‘love, hate, war, peace’ sometimes gives really amazing results - esthetically and philosophically. I was amazed, how randomness can produce such nice results, sometimes I saved some of the best ones I encountered, maybe I’ll link to them later on.

I’m always open for comments and suggestions

Richard Rogers is writing a new piece and collected some info related to using googlenews:

For scraper and visualizations devices that sit atop Google News, see
- Marcos Weskamp�s newsmap, 2004, http://www.marumushi.com/apps/newsmap/index.cfm;
- Michal Migurski�s In the News, 2004, http://news.stamen.com/ and
- Douwe Osinga�s Google News Map, 2004, http://douweosinga.com/projects/googlenewsmap. Osinga’s source code for the standalone version is available at http://douweosinga.com/projects/googlenewsmap/NewsMap.zip.

Weskamp has received a letter from Google, explaining that his project violates Google News’s terms of use; it remains online. For an effort to scrape Google News and provide an RSS feed, see Julian Bond�s Gnews2RSS, http://www.voidstar.com/gnews2rss.php. Google sent a cease and desist letter to Bonds, and according to his list posting of 30 March 2004 (http://groups.yahoo.com/group/syndication/message/4405) and an Internetnews.com item of 1 April 2004 (http://www.internetnews.com/ec-news/article.php/3334651), he decided to no longer offer Google News RSS feeds on the Web, and switched to Yahoo News, which traditionally has a more liberal policy in offering feeds (http://www.voidstar.com/node.php?id=1740). To syndicate a particular source from Google News, using the standalone version of Gnews2RSS, see also Steve Rubin’s hack at http://www.rssgov.com/archives/000129.html. Another Google News to RSS effort by Kumaraguru Gajarajan is written in python, http://www.muselog.net/googlenews/googlenews.py.

I guess the googlenews fuzz about scraping their service is because it is (and probably will always be) a beta version. In general scraping sites is ok if you don’t use it for commercial purposes. That’s why google can’t get it out of beta - otherwise they’ll have to pay big time to get the rights on all these articles.

And as Auke pointed out:
(more…)

Looks like the project i’m involved with together with auke. Our project scrapes the images on news.google.com and displays the pictures that occur multiple times. That way you see which pictures are shown a lot all over the world. There are some catches ofcourse. More in a later post, together with the presentation

10×10 / 100 Words and Pictures that Define the Time / by Jonathan J. Harris
Every hour, 10×10 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, 10×10 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.

Popular Tags on Flickr Photo Sharing

Flickr is a service where you can upload pics, annotate them and give them access policies. That way people can look for terms and find the pics. Also easy integration of those pics in your own blog.
Commercial though … The page i pointed at is pretty cool and free.

the media deconstruction kit (mdk) - scrambles live news broadcasts and puts the altered matter out on the Net. (featured project at the Experimental Party DisInformation Center, by the US Department of Art & Technology, an immersive media installation subverting Republican propaganda, opens in New York on Saturday, August 21st and will run through Saturday, September 4th.)