News update

I haven't been writing to this blog for a long time so it is about time to give you a quick update on the ongoing work. At the moment I'm looking at different applications of the Crazy Diamonds core and let me tell you something about the one I've been working on at the start of this year.

I am going to introduce a new way to read your daily news, called 'visual news reading':


Instead of going from site to site this approach shows you an overview of all news item images from a number of predefined sites. Images with a similar subject are clustered and text-labeled. I did not upload a video as before because of the poor resolution of the result.

Hovering over an image will enlarge the image and show a textual description of the news item. What you see here is a cluster of images (from multiple websites) related to the Democratic race between Obama and Clinton in the US election. The mouse pointer has disappeared because of the screenshot.


Clicking an image will open up the original source and scroll down to the news item:



This tools allows you to really dig into a news item without surfing from site to site and searching for it.

In this case images were taken from news headlines pages but other categories can be defined and shown such as Sport, Showbiz, etc.

I think this tool could be interesting for people at home but also for entertaining people in public places like waiting rooms, airports etc. I've noticed during demo's that people really have fun playing with this tool, especially the way the images interact with each other.

At the moment I'm working on a web-based version of this tool using .NET's Silverlight technology. I'll keep you informed on the progress of this little visual news reader and would appreciate any feedback from you people.