June 29, 2005

Today's Front Pages: a nifty Flash application that allows you to see which news stories are getting front-page play across the country. [via kos]
posted by the_bone 18 years ago
  • I was able to actually walk to the newstand, have a cup of coffee, and check out the headlines there before this thing finished "loading"... :-) a clever product, but it's WAY too slow... google news does a better job, IMHO.
  • For me, the key word here is see. Being one of those visually-inclined types, I do appreciate being able to browse the pdf'd images of various front pages (especially international publications). Doubtful that I would actually use this to "get" my news though.
  • Oh, I loved it! That's really quite a neat tool, since it lets you see exactly how stories are positioned on the page, what photo accompanied, etc. Often that shows so much about the paper and looking at a bunch of papers lets you get a feel for the reaction to the news. Terrific stuff. And HB, I think you prolly just need a faster computer, because I found it rather zippy considering the amount of data it was uploading; the slowest page to load was the N.America one, and even that only took about 30 seconds or less. My only beef is that it promises Africa, and then it only has one paper. One! Sigh. That's where I was looking forward to this the most.
  • 43 seconds to load the North American Page (cable modem, new macintosh)... then I have to hover over a city to see an unreadable (other than headlines) graphic, and then click on the city to see a larger graphic, and then download a pdf which I can then actually read.. or, google news headlines in 5 seconds, one click... it's pretty, and a nice idea, implimentation isn't where it needs to be yet.
  • 9 seconds from first click, randomly selected a spot, to see full JPG of front page.
  • Yeah, yeah, yeah, we know, ain't technology wunnerful. Those of us who are 56K by choice, by location, or by wallet, I salute you. Maybe I'll check this out when I get to work in the big city where they have DSL available. Meanwhile, did you hear the latest news? The Hindenburg has crashed!
  • This reminds me of a cable news show that has the host do a quick comparative analysis of tomorrow's front pages from across the nation. On rare occasions, the host compares international headlines. It was kind of interesting to see, with the help of that site, how many papers in the U.S. went with the quote from Bush's speech "It is worth it," as a headline, compared to "Bush defends..." or something else.