Slashdot Mirror
A New Google News Data Visualization, with Source
migurski writes "For those who liked the Newsmap, this new data visualization experiment focuses on time-based views of Google's news service, showing the ebb and flow of people and places covered, with archives back to February. All source code is available under a Creative Commons license, for those who like to play."
What's new since April?
I have no idea what's on that page, but it crashes Konqueror. It's just some flash stuff as far as I can see, and flash stuff is no problem, but that page dumps Konq.
Just thought I'd point it out for teh Konq users...
I'm not a prophet or a stone-age man,
I'm just a mortal with potential of a super man.
I got mine on the 3rd try, but I figure seeing the text of the screen will help you boys and girls that are trying to write SCRIPTS automatically keep trying the Gmail Machine!
And no, you're not getting my new gmail address! I want to keep it spam free.
Best Buy can have you arrested
Did you ever stop to think that the reason that the archives go back to Febuary is that Febuary is when this tool was released? And did you ever look at the newsmap web site, where they credit this "new" site for the inspiration to make newsmap.
The GMail Invite Machine is a project of The Broken.org, which mainly Kevin Rose of TechTV fame. Most of its invites that it's giving away stem from the fact that everyone at TechTV has a GMail account and they've pooled their invites into that.
Gmail may be a stunt, but Newsmap wouldn't be -- Google isn't behind it.
This thing seems confusing and incomplete after newsmap. You only get a noun-type 2-3 word blurb for each story. Its interesting for the time-based approach, but it doesn't seem very useful for actually browsing the news.
Slashdot should consider using some kind of treemap interface as an alternative interface, based on number of comments and clickthroughs and such. I would definitely use something like that, just on the front page, to see what's getting attention. If you're anything like me, you often scan the stories to see how many comments they've received, and thus where the raging debate is.
(Of course, newsmap was made in Flash, which a lot of Slashdotters are chronically allergic to. Cue chorus of FlashHatas(TM) in 3, 2, 1...)
If Jesus wants me it knows where to find me.
Sorry to burst your bubble, but these cool new uses for Google's massive infrastructure aren't 'new' or '1st-Party' in any at all.
/. and discussed already on any tech-aware blog many times over.
People have been making interesting and cool things that tie into the Google API for years now. Visual search engines, google-fighting, and other uses have been posted to
Safari 1.2.2 (newest public version) seems to work fine.
Konq is actually fine. I'm not sure what dumped it since I've been clicking around the page with no problems after a re-load...
sorry folks...
I'm not a prophet or a stone-age man,
I'm just a mortal with potential of a super man.
Google News doesn't even have any interface in the Google API at all. These projects are most often based on HTML-ripping because that's the only way to go.
Google could shut such projects down, but so long as they're not overly commericalized or overly taxing to Google's systems they usually just let them stand.
Back in 1998 SmartMoney came out with its Map of the Market which was a Java-based visualization of activity in the stock market. SmartMoney now has a whole set of maps that track technology, health care, Internet and telecommunications stocks, as well as several others.
While it wasn't the first attempt to graphically represent vast amounts of dynamic data with multiple dimensions, it was probably one of the first -- if not the first -- free online visualization tool that was popularized through the Internet.
Some people have commented that the Google News Map project isn't very useful. The SmartMoney map was a basic tool when it started but now the company has a (subscription-based) detailed data visualization tool (MapStation) based on the free version, as well as risk analysis maps and others.
Give it time and the people behind the Google News Map, or someone else, will come up with a more advanced map that will provide the type of utility you're looking for.
Exactly!
The original inspiration for this (which I imagine I should put in the explanation somewhere) was a historical world-empires map, that showed relative political influences of various nations and empires throughout history as a percentage of total world power. Lines for a given political force (Egypt, Rome, HRE, USA...) widened and narrowed depending on thier relative world power at a given time. The graph went from ~3000 BC to the present day.
The interesting point was that world influence was considered a zero-sum game: the total amount of power shared stayed constant. In this case, I'm treating the "In The News" sidebar as an expression of news prevalence: sampled every 15 minutes, a term can be considered to have "maximum" mindshare if it appears in that list every time. George Bush, John Kerry, Abu Ghraib are good examples of terms that have consistently maintained near-maximum share. Scroll back to mid-to-late March to see Richard Clarke, Condi Rice, and National Security dominate.
I've been checking Newsmap fairly often. It seems similar in theme.
f m
http://www.marumushi.com/apps/newsmap/newsmap.c
It hasn't taken "primary" status in my daily news reading, but it is an interesting "auxilliary".
Jim