Wired News:The Art of News Feeds
RSS newsreaders deliver headlines with all the panache of a brick.
But a growing number of bohemian RSS mashups are combining news feeds with style, art and whimsy.
Electronic artists are tweaking RSS interfaces, harnessing Flash animation and relational algorithms to breed outlandish, new ways of presenting information captured from news feeds.
Average Shoveler, for example, resembles an old Commodore 64 game that lets the user wander through the streets of New York, stopping to shovel piles of snow that suddenly transform into images from current news.
Passersby blurt out chunks of news -- drawn from Yahoo's news feed -- in cartoon bubbles. All this is set to music composed by Gabriel Yared, award-winning composer of scores for movies such as The English Patient and Cold Mountain. Average Shoveler was created by artist Carlo Zanni. The graphics were inspired by the late-'80s classic, Leisure Suit Larry.
Another artsy newsreader, Phylotaxis, presents an array of gently quivering dots that contain a photo, a story preview and a link to the story's web page. Its elegant, sunflowerlike pattern was created by Jonathan Harris based on the Fibonacci series.
Meanwhile, Ofer Luft and Yaniv Steiner combined the popular Flickr photo site with RSS news feeds, creating FlickrFling, which pulls Flickr images tagged with words that match headlines picked from several news services. The result is a kind of collage of not-quite-random images correlating to news headlines.
But a growing number of bohemian RSS mashups are combining news feeds with style, art and whimsy.
Electronic artists are tweaking RSS interfaces, harnessing Flash animation and relational algorithms to breed outlandish, new ways of presenting information captured from news feeds.
Average Shoveler, for example, resembles an old Commodore 64 game that lets the user wander through the streets of New York, stopping to shovel piles of snow that suddenly transform into images from current news.
Passersby blurt out chunks of news -- drawn from Yahoo's news feed -- in cartoon bubbles. All this is set to music composed by Gabriel Yared, award-winning composer of scores for movies such as The English Patient and Cold Mountain. Average Shoveler was created by artist Carlo Zanni. The graphics were inspired by the late-'80s classic, Leisure Suit Larry.
Another artsy newsreader, Phylotaxis, presents an array of gently quivering dots that contain a photo, a story preview and a link to the story's web page. Its elegant, sunflowerlike pattern was created by Jonathan Harris based on the Fibonacci series.
Meanwhile, Ofer Luft and Yaniv Steiner combined the popular Flickr photo site with RSS news feeds, creating FlickrFling, which pulls Flickr images tagged with words that match headlines picked from several news services. The result is a kind of collage of not-quite-random images correlating to news headlines.