Fabrica is the world-famous Benneton-sponsored design school, or creative campus, or something. I’ve never quite been sure what to call it. What’s important though, is the fact that it’s a physical space where a lot of interesting communication experiments are given room to develop.

Jonathan Harris of Number 27 has recently published a project called Ten By Ten with Fabrica’s support, and it really is something special.

Ten By Ten is a visual news aggregator – an hourly snapshot taken from the net’s major news sources and displayed in a simple, unthreatening format. It’s a logical progression from the technology behind Google News, but it’s a huge leap forward in interface terms.

I don’t think I can describe Ten By Ten’s process any better than its creator can, so here’s what he says:

“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.”

So, it automatically scans news sources hourly for the most popular subjects, grabs images to go with each, and displays them in a nice neat grid – which is then archived for access in the future as well as displayed for viewing within ten minutes.

What makes Ten By Ten more than just another data experiment is the interface design. Rolling your mouse around the grid highlights the word behind each image. Clicking any image elegantly opens up a window giving you the headlines from a range of sources, all of which are links to the full stories.

So far, so good – it’s all intuitive. What Ten By Ten amounts to is a new way of accessing up-to-date news through the internet. The headlines, in pictures, every hour, unbiased. Colour me impressed.

Aside from the obvious horror and inhumanity described, this article from last week’s Guardian describes the complete insanity of some of the US military’s top brass, from Vietnam to the present day. It’s hilarious, until you get to the part where it’s linked with recent atrocities in Abu Ghraib.

The Road to Abu Ghraib

“… in the mid-1980s Special Forces undertook a secret initiative, codenamed Project Jedi, to create super soldiers – soldiers with super powers.”