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Visualizing Stories On Current Events With Newsmap
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."
While this is really cool, it is ofcourse a snapshot of current state of affairs: how many times is a certain news item highlighted.
The very small items could however be interesting too:
Take for example a small accident that gets catched on by more and more news companies as time goes on, simply because it is found out that an important person was involved.
Thus, 'small' news items that have a 'high rate of increase' across various sites should be voted more important than static ones.
For simplicity sake, perhaps this could be done visually (simply animate the news from a certain point in time forward to the now, and you see developments more clearly).
This thing is certainly an eye-opener however, applauds to the designer.
Slashdot: stuff for news, nerds that matter, matter for news, stuff that nerd
Another area that could benefit from it is Google Zeitgeist
This is a great technology for those studying media and culture. It reminds me a bit of the HP technology that tracks the spread of stories on web logs. What would be interesting is a combination of the following:
- the information and utility of Newsmap.
- the tracking of the HP blog project.
- the ability to track the author, source, and parent company of each article.
It is interesting to see how much press a given story is picking up, but it is even more interesting to track what media giant is publishing that story in as many of its subsidiaries as it can. This would allow people to see just how much control each conglomerate has over what news the public is allowed to consume. By the same token, what stories are seeing the least coverage? What potentially important news is being "obscured by shit"? Who publishes the news first? What companies merely follow stories that others have already broken?------- "One of the joys of travel is visiting new towns and meeting new people." -- G. KHAN
I'm bad at filing stuff in any sort of systematic
Me, too.
I've tried to clean up my top level home directory so that there's only a screenfull of concise subdirectories listed, then everything goes into those.
Problem is, some of those subdirectories become chock full at the next level. I have a directory called "tmp/src" that includes about every imagined release of some interesting application tarball ever made.
Then, documents can hide way down in some particular project directory.
Instead of a static view of my files and work, I'd like VFolders that could be generated a lot like Google Searches, including criterion such as file type, time last accessed, keywords in the document.
I remember reading once of some crazy guy that used CVS for his home directory, but I think CVS is too clunky. But he had gem of an idea: time travel - "I want to see my desktop from 8 months ago".
And, yes, while a graphical tree is really nice, I'd like to be able to navigate through any tree using pure text-based tools, terminals if I desired.
Maybe then I could make my own "/usr/bin" sane instead of what my sysadmin thinks is a good idea.
"Provided by the management for your protection."
Newsmap is based on Treemaps, which is both a conceptual GUI idiom as well as a commercial product. This is the work that Ben Schneiderman is most well-known for, and he's been working on different forms of interactive information visualization for decades.
The parent was asking about projects like KDE and Gnome picking up cool concepts like this. The HCI world is full of 'hey neat' ideas that on the surface really seem like they should be brought into the fold, but aren't for a variety of reasons. One company in particular that I worked for (and won't name) has a really cool project that I feel could become a standard UI idiom like radio buttons and scrollpanes, but the product is doomed to failure because the company is horribly mismanaged and (having been the sole coder--as an intern, even) I also know the code to be completely inflexibly designed. Furthermore, they want to make all sorts of money on the thing, which means they're charging customers an arm and a leg to use it.
The Linux desktop environment projects have issues equally as inibitive as the one described above, but rather than being financially oriented, their problems are more about ego and (with the exception of some of the KDE guys) a complete misunderstanding of what HCI is all about. I really wish KDE/Gnome would use these experimental UI metaphors, but alas, I think their structures prohibit this sort of thing.