Comments on: Interactive storytelling experiment #2: The urban areas of tomorrow

By: Back from the snow on hypernarrative.com, a weblog by Wilbert Baan about Art, Media and Technology (v. 3.6)

Sun, 02 Mar 2008 19:58:45 +0000

[…] Wilbert @Erik Wow the FlickrNews ticker is very cool. Sorry for my l… Erik Borra Simplest dom + xpath to get all urls from http://news.google... Wilbert Good idea, I tried to do some things with scraping Google he… Erik Borra Great! Love it! What about scraping news headlines and by… Wilbert Voila: … Wilbert Help me create a better story. This is the text used in the… […]

By: Wilbert

Wilbert — Sun, 02 Mar 2008 17:34:15 +0000

@Erik Wow the FlickrNews ticker is very cool. Sorry for my late reply I was on a holiday.

I don’t really understand the code you wrote above. I understand what it does, but my coding is often based on examples made by others and help files/manuals.

By: Anne Helmond » Dear MTV, I Wanna Be MADE into a killer PHP programmer

Anne Helmond » Dear MTV, I Wanna Be MADE into a killer PHP programmer — Sun, 02 Mar 2008 15:31:13 +0000

[…] Interactive storytelling experiment #2: The urban areas of tomorrow by Wilbert Baan […]

By: wordpress.justlol.net » Google News interpretations by Flickr

wordpress.justlol.net » Google News interpretations by Flickr — Sat, 23 Feb 2008 22:11:28 +0000

[…] Inspired by Wilbert Baan’s Interactive Story Telling Experiment and a spare hour to code, I made another system using Flickr to generate image to a story. This time the system scrapes headlines from Google News, gets significant terms from Yahoo, and then queries those as tags in Flickr. This way Flickr provides random, though clarifying, pictures to the headlines - let us say the photo editorial is generative but often illuminating. I’ve made it scroll down automatically and reload when all headlines have been flickrified so I can have my spare screen act as an augmented rss-reader / issue-ticker. You can try it yourself at flickrNews. […]

By: Erik Borra

Erik Borra — Fri, 22 Feb 2008 15:06:44 +0000

Simplest dom + xpath to get all urls from http://news.google.com is as follows in php 5:
$dom = new DOMDocument;
$dom->loadHTML(implode(”,file(’http://news.google.com’)));
$xpath = new DOMXPath($dom);
$titles = $xpath->query(”//div/a”);
foreach($titles as $title) {
$text = $title->nodeValue;
$href = $title->getAttribute(’href’);
print “$text“;
}

Enjoy :)

By: Wilbert

Wilbert — Fri, 22 Feb 2008 12:46:03 +0000

Good idea, I tried to do some things with scraping Google headlines but I couldn’t get it to work my programming isn’t that good.

Thanks for the feedback, i’ll try to slow it down.

By: Erik Borra

Erik Borra — Fri, 22 Feb 2008 10:16:54 +0000

Great! Love it! What about scraping news headlines and bylines … get the headlines mentioning a Country or City, get the byline, and display those. This way you’ll have a truly generic storyteller of current localized events; told in pictures by citizens instead of the professionals. I’ve got some PHP scripts for Google News if you like :) This reminds me of work I did with govcom.org for ZKM (see movies.issuecrawler.net) Oh Yeah, Maybe it should be a little bit slower, it’s too fast to read the text, marvel at the pictures, and connect the two - in my opinion.

By: Wilbert

Wilbert — Fri, 22 Feb 2008 09:29:17 +0000

Help me create a better story. This is the text used in the movie

_root.title1 = “We live in cities”;
_root.description1 = “Since 2006 more than half of the world population lives in cities”;
//
_root.title2 = “Power”;
_root.description2 = “The US elects a new president. The most influential person in the world”;
//
_root.title3 = “The Consumer Era”;
_root.description3 = “Todays world is shaped by western culture, technology, power and consumption”;
//
_root.title4 = “Growing in the East”;
_root.description4 = “Cities are growing together creating dense urban areas; Mega Cores”;
//
_root.title5 = “Beihai, China 10.58% growth”;
_root.description5 = “The fastest growing urban areas are In China, India and Africa”;
//
_root.title6 = “Ghaziabad, India 5.20% growth”;
_root.description6 = “The projected growth for the fastest growing urban area is over 10% in 2020″;
//
_root.title7 = “Sana’s, Yemen 5.00% growth”;
_root.description7 = “In a global and mass production era quantity controls the price”;
//
_root.title8 = “Surat, India 4.99% growth”;
_root.description8 = “The real power is in the consumer, their demand controls world economy”;
//
_root.title9 = “Kabul, Afghanistan 4.74% growth”;
_root.description9 = “And the new consumer lives in the rapid developing countries”;
//
_root.title10 = “Bamako, Mali 4.45% growth”;
_root.description10 = “Cities can’t control the growth, creating an architectural and infrastructural freedom vacuum”;
//
_root.title11 = “Lagos, Nigeria 4.44% growth”;
_root.description11 = “Growing natural and often uncontrolled slum-cities create large, dense urban areas”;
//
_root.title12 = “Faridabad, India 4.44% growth”;
_root.description12 = “Creating their own local eco-system, jobs and shops”;
//
_root.title13 = “Dar es Salaam, Tanzania 4.39% growth”;
_root.description13 = “In these new cities lives the new consumers”;
//
_root.title14 = “Chittagong, Bangladesh 4.29% growth”;
_root.description14 = “Consumer demand controls the world”;