I originally wanted to focus on how:
-People are on their cell phones a lot
-People leading busy lives having little time
-Information overload [amount of of new data generated in 2005 was many orders of magnitude
greater than the whole library of congress, several exabytes created, nearly 37,000 times more]
-How to make information fun
-Serendipity of finding interesting articles
I am still learning as3, so my first prototype is limited, only showing newswire headlines and
how long the article would take to read (iphone app in mind). I focused on the aspect of
time to read articles. For example, you might be waiting in a long line and only have time to
read a 5 minute article and not much more, even though there are more interesting articles to
read…time is of the essence these days.
prototype in as3
To address the bullet points above, I conceptualized a cross word puzzle that was created using
Aonaware dictionary API & Newswire NYT API. Answers to the crosswords are headlines from the last 24 hrs and
clues are taken from the dictionary API. Once any crossword item is found, a link to that article is made available on mouse hover. Words are color coded for Category [i.e. business, culture, etc.] and a number is posted on the last square to tell the user how long the item will take to read. This makes for a fun way to learn words, find serendipitous articles and make fun/efficient use of time.
Newswire crossword - data viz play