Swap photos in CNN news stories for fun

IMAGINE like Lennon's song. Or, sadly, imagine some things a little less complicated than World Peace. For instance, imagine being able to change the photos that appear in articles and news stories at will, and then email the story URL to your friends to get a laugh. Well, now you can, at least if you apply some creative thinking to CNN news, as displayed on the Netscape.com portal.

As a regular reader of The Onion and fond of its sense of humour, I often end up taking the day's news, applying some bitmap editing to the stories, and e-mailing the "redesigned" story to my list of friends. But bitmap editing takes a lot of time. I was surprised to find a way to give news stories a new spin, just by messing with the URLs... and with no server-side "hacking" involved. Here are some examples:

Original: "HP Unveils Virtual Conference Rooms"
(click for story here)

Modified (not-so-exciting conference rooms ;) version of the news story
(modified photo story is here)

Original: Bush Estimates 30,000 Iraqis Killed in War (original story here)

Same story with not-so-memorable image of the President (modified story here).

A few more examples. (*):

(Original story here, and the modified one here).

"Honda Robot serves tea, pushes Mail Carts"
(Find the photo-swapped story here, and the original one here).

(*) You don't have to agree with my sense of irony or humour, but the good part is, you can do your own picture swaps, see below.

By now, you are either slightly amused, or mad at me. It doesn't matter. I will get to the technical details that make this possible: the news site back end is designed to be very flexible and can pull the news story text based on one code passed in the URL, and the picture based on a photo code also embedded in the URL. Switch (or add it if there's none) the photo ID code and bingo, you have one amusing news story to mail around.

In case you're wondering how to obtain the ID codes for photos in the site's database, well, I noticed that there's the Netscape Photo Search engine which is very powerful and lets you find photos from the site's news wire feeds, just by entering some keywords. Once you have found a picture you like, click on it and you'll notice the "photo ID" embedded in the URL (&photoid={code}). Simply remove the ".jpg" from it and use that to replace the existing one (or add it in case the original story has no photo) to any news story that appears in cnn.netscape.cnn.com. Simple, isn't it?.

You might be wondering: what's the purpose?. Well, the purpose is to show you that you can get creative by looking and paying close attention to what's into URLs. It also shows you that web developers can avoid these kind of problems by at least obscuring some parameters passed to the web server as part of the URL. And finally, if you insist on getting really serious, it also shows you how changing a photo can radically change the perception of the whole news story and the issue presented, just by looking at the picture and reading the title, before your eyeballs even hit the story text.

I'm sure the folks at netscape.com won't mind the extra hits because of this play, after all we're not messing up or changing content on their server, just requesting a story with a different picture than the one originally intended. Hey, it might not be something as psychodelic as badgerbadgerbadger.com, but I enjoyed this little discovery, and certainly managed to confuse/annoy/amuse a couple of friends who received my "tweaked" news stories. Please, netscape.com/CNN webmasters, don't turn off this great feature! µ