Talk about the ghost in the machine! 10×10 Mobile is a mobile version of a web app for use on Nokia devices that collects and displays the 100 words and pictures that matter most globally on an hourly and daily basis, and it does so without any direct human intervention.

The 10×10 website creates a kind of online patchwork quilt made of news photos. The quilt is constructed every hour of every day by an automated program. The program scans the RSS feeds from a handful of international news sources and then, using a linguistic algorithm, selects the top 100 words. It then automatically collects 100 photos related to those stories, and displays them on a 10 by 10 grid. Again, all without direct human intervention. Here’s how it looks on the website:

Click on any photo in the grid, and up pops a window that contains a handful of headlines. For example, in a recent grid, a photo of Brazilian president ‘Lula’ da Silva was number 8 with the headline ‘president’. Click on the photo, and up pops this box:

Over time, says 10×10 creator Jonathan Harris, the app ‘leaves a trail of these hourly statements which, stitched together side by side, form a continuous patchwork tapestry of human life’.

The mobile version of 10×10, developed with Flash Lite for Nokia S60 5 Edition (Touch UI) devices by Forum Nokia Champion Leonardo Risuleo, offers most but not all of the features of the web app. Called 10×10 Mobile, it provides a quick, mobile and graphical way of seeing what’s happening in the world at any given moment.

The mobile version is pretty much the same as the web version, though it lacks a few of the latter’s functions. For example, while you do see all 100 photos, you do not see them all at once. On my test device, a Nokia N97, I could see just 26 photos at a time, arranged in nine rows of three photos per row — except for the last row, which displays only two photos, plus a ‘load next items’ box. Here’s a look:

10×10 Mobile works only on Nokia touch-enabled devices, so to scroll up and down the screen, you simply drag your finger or the stylus. It works well. Tapping once on a photo enlarges it. Tapping on the photo a second time brings up its keyword (for example, using the President Lula example above, the keyword would be ‘president’). But unlike the web-based app, the mobile app does not provide any headlines. Next, tap the photo a third time, and it reverts to its slightly enlarged version. Tap on the white X in the photo’s upper right-hand corner, and the photo returns to its miniature size in the full grid. Here’s a photo that I tapped twice, to show its keyword:

Both the mobile and web version of 10×10 offer a very cool feature: history. You select any date and hour since 2004, and then get a 100-photo snapshot of what was happening at that moment. Wondering what was in the news on your birthday in 2005? 10×10 can tell you.

To use the history feature on 10×10 Mobile, you tap the Options box. It presents you with five options: Top Now, the photo grid for the current hour; Top Today, the grid for the day overall; Top Yesterday, the overall grid for the preceding day; Pick a date, which lets you select a year, day and hour from the past; and Credits.

10×10 Mobile is available now in Ovi Store, and it is free. The app runs on Nokia S60 5th Edition (Touch UI) devices, takes up just 0.09 megabytes of device memory, and requires an open Internet connection while running.

You can learn more about the developer Leonardo Risuleo on his blog.

And to see 10×10 Mobile in action, check out this YouTube video: