gorilla massacre story: briefly in print, wonderfully longer online

Strangely enough, in the current edition of National Geographic there was only a single 2 page Brent Stirton image on this story about the recent gorilla massacres in Congo. But there’s a great video treatment of it online at NGM.com, produced by the gang at MediaStorm.

10×10, no human input needed

It’s not new but it’s always fun: 10×10 is a widget written by Jonathan Harris that scans the wires every hour to look for the 100 top words in news stories, then chooses 100 corresponding imagesThe site explains: “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.”

However, if you look at the picture choices, they’re often repetitive, boring or missing. For instance, the Prime Mnister of Australia just conceded the election but they couldn’t find a picture of him? I mean, the guy has only been in politics for 33 years. But hey, who needs human input?

If you liked 10×10, check out WordCount, the 88,000 most frequently used English words arranged as one very long sentence.