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."

Comments

Pretty cool

[dealsites]

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!

Hold the front page!

[klokwise]

Stop Press!

... and all other amusing phrases to go with their breaking story of "500 Internal Server Error".

Maybe GUIs could learn from this

[syslog]

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

Re:Maybe GUIs could learn from this

[tiled_rainbows]

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.

Re:Maybe GUIs could learn from this

[bheer]

> they seem to have removed the ability to turn them off now.

Windows: "Start | Setttings | Taskbar and start menu" has a checkbox (different locations I think for 2000 and XP/2003) to disable personalized menus. If you use XP's Luna theme (why?), the "All Programs" flyout is un-personalized.

Office (2000, XP, 2003): right click on the main toolbar, Customize, Options tab, uncheck "Menus show most recently used commands first".

It works!

[Rosco P. Coltrane]

hat way, you get an immediate feel for news patterns (what the media in any particular region is gravitating to)

I clicked on the link and Mozilla popped a window saying "The document contains no data" : this indeed matches exactly what I've been seeing in the TV news for years.

Well done!

Wow...

[scrm]

The main headline is Internal Server Error. Pretty neat.

Kinda Neat.

[jellomizer]

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.

Maybe it needs a time factor ?

[thrill12]

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.

Re:so?

[angusr]

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.

Slashdot map:

[Dark Lord Seth]

<--- You are here.

The latest news article is over here --->

CmdrTaco is not here --->

<--- ... but here.

Also, articles in sector 24-D are down for maintenance and the MPF ( Moderator Patrol Force ) has had som skirmishes with GNAA trolls in sectors 12-C, 13-C, 13-D, 13-E and 14-D. Beware of crossfire and goatses.

Heatmaps in the trading space

[agslashdot]

Heatmaps have been around in the trading space for a while now. Every brokerage firm & most trading mags have heatmaps which show where the market is headed visually, exactly the way this "newsmap" works. eg. Nasdaq heatmap

Another area that could benefit from it is Google Zeitgeist

Akin to Map of the Market

[Chriscypher]

The tool is very similar in concept to Map of the Market, found on smart money's site. It visually displays stocks positioned by market segment and sized by capitalization. It's very handy for distinguishing overall stock market trends.

Re:To Save You Some Time...

[Ateryx]

This one isn't a hoax. This actually looks like a cool and potentially useful product.

The last time I believed anyone on slashdot I ended up with goatse all over my monitor.