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Visualizing Stories On Current Events With Newsmap

Posted by simoniker on from the zeinab-badawi dept.

hrbrmstr writes "Marcos Weskamp and Dan Albritton have created Newsmap, an extremely cool way of visualizing news stories. The site takes the aggregated content from Google News (globally) and maps it out into a visual space. That way, you get an immediate feel for news patterns (what the media in any particular region is gravitating to) - there's quite a bit of potential here."

9 of 114 comments (clear)

  1. Pretty cool by dealsites · · Score: 5, Insightful

    It's obvious that this guy has some programming ntalent. I wonder if Google will chase him down and we'll see this at labs.google.com soon?

    That makes me start to wonder... Maybe the best way to get a job with a company you like is to write some slick code that helps to benefit the company. Once the company finds out about your project, they might decide to hire you. It's kinda of like writting a customized resume for a particluar company.

    --
    No April fools jokes here. I promise!

  2. so? by kevinvee · · Score: 1, Insightful

    All of the english-printing countries are reporting about the same 10 subjects anyways, and I can't read the other ones. Its a flashy front end to localized news articles, nothing innovative here.

    1. Re:so? by junklight · · Score: 3, Insightful

      The news is culled from many sources - each of those sources are edited by people who decide how important any given news item is. This shows an amalgamation of those decisions allowing you to see at a glance what is deemed important or not. But if you would rather read your local paper I am sure no-one will mind

    2. Re:so? by angusr · · Score: 5, Insightful
      It's not the access to the stories that is the useful function. It's the visualisation of the relative importance of the stories, or - rather - how important the stories are perceived to be by the media (or how successful the propoganda/marketing has been, depending on the story).

      1001 news sources have the same stories, yes. The vast majority have the placment and hence importance of those stories decided by editors who, because they're human, have biases and agendas. Google News (and some others) places the stories based on algorithmic results and hence only shows the "group bias" of the world's media. This is just an easy way to visualise that, allowing single-click filtering on various fields and the ability to see many more stories per page and pick out the "important" ones.

      Yes, nothing terribly mindblowing (and I've seen a file display recently with a very similar layout, showing files as blocks with proportionate sizes and colours based on last access) but it's still neat, and did help me spot some interesting stories that I'd missed on my regular news sites.

  3. Maybe GUIs could learn from this by syslog · · Score: 5, Insightful
    This is a pretty cool concept - maybe desktop environments like KDE and GNOME could do something like this. Something simple, like making most often used files, programs etc larger and more apparent, with the less used items growing smaller and smaller with disuse till they disappear entirely and are cleaned up from the system.

    Of course such a system would require a bunch of gotchas to be taken care of... no one wants "ls" deleted just because a user didn't use it for a month :) Maybe only largish applications are affected by such an algorithm? Maybe the distribution marks certain directories as do-not-touch items, and the rest are affected? Maybe only user-installed apps are affected?

    Thoughts?

    -naeem

    1. Re:Maybe GUIs could learn from this by tiled_rainbows · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Trouble is, I have the opposite problem in real life: I have now problem finding the last ten documents or so that I've been working on, but if I want to find something from a couple of weeks ago, it's a real pain if I can't remember where I put it. And I'm bad at filing stuff in any sort of systematic way, so it's often a PITA.

      Maybe your idea would be useful to me if I could rewind somehow and take a look at what my desktop looked like an a certain date in the past, showing all the files and stuff I was using most round that time.

      --

      evil math within Nature's Cubic Creation!
  4. Kinda Neat. by jellomizer · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I guess the tech economy is improving. We are getting more cool stuff stories and less lawsuit stories (except for SCO).
    The only problem I really have with this type of technology is that it makes a less popular story so small that you can't read it. It also may make some people think that a less popular story is not as important as a more popular one, which is not always the case. I often find the popular news stories to be things that people can easily take a stance on without reading the details. And the less popular ones you need to read the details to get.
    I feel mapping like this could cause important information to be put away in a way that cannot be found.

    --
    If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
  5. It'll take some getting used to... by SSJVegeto2001 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I tried to use this and I ended up with strained eyes. It seems like a good idea, but I think most people will stick to using what they are used to. It might help if they softened the colors a bit.

  6. Re:Cool, but why flash? by ThePretender · · Score: 2, Insightful

    or some CSS work, so it is still up-to-date when using tables to format everything is finally put to rest.

    But maybe Flash is just what he knows best, and other versions could follow if it becomes more popular. Can't please everybody with your proof of concept work.