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."

Comments

great...

[demonhold]

but,what is it for?

a bug or an egg?

[Barryke]

Its got some kind of bug in it..

When you click "mr. Reagan" (hehehe good luck searching, its on Sat. June 19, about 10 blocks from the far right end.

Notice the white thing aprearing top left ??

Ironic...

[frostman]

I just installed Flashblock on Firefox so I could surf in peace on my old Linux laptop, and now this...

It's interesting enough but doesn't really give you much information - not that I could easily figure out anyway.

It would be nice to see the terms related to each other somehow... like in the hatemap on hatester.

Mindspace tracking

[drenehtsral]

I can tell you what it's for: Mindspace tracking. A large number of people read the news every day. Each one of them gathers these little bits of information in some rough proportion to how often they're mentioned, filtered through their level of interest in any given subject.

Say you want to place ads, or make a strategy for getting your message out, or watch a news story explode and see which things get increasing print space over time proportional to how important they are. There you go.

For instance, if this has been the week after Howard Dean's "scream", we would have seen the coverage of that ramp up until it displaced a bunch of issues of much higher world importance.

It's something to think about. This tool seems sort of crude, but it's open source so it could be expanded.

Re:Mindspace tracking

[LostCluster]

Conversely, those who have news that they have to release that they don't want too much attention for can do their best to try to time such disclosures for days on which the news mindspace is completely jammed by a larger story. For example, last Friday the Ronald Reagan funeral was covered by all of the major broadcast networks during the early evening block where local and national newscasts are typically aired in most of the USA... essentially meaning that story captured 100% of those usual programs. Even in the PT time zone where the event was not a direct hit, it could be expected that their newscasts would be heavy on funeral coverage since he was the governor of California before being president.

So, if a company has a price increase to announce or the shutdown of a product line, timing the bad news to hit on that day would likely cause the story to be ignored even if it would have made the B-block of a newscast on a typical day. Saturday newscasts are much lower-rated than weekday ones, and by Monday the story would be old news. Sure, a few soruces might pick up the story, but the mass media would be occupied with something else.

But news.google not covered by google API?

[cryophan]

the google API does not include Google news query rights, so how did they query google news?

Seems awfully familiar...

[Chucklz]

It is interesting to see Google data displayed this way. Probably most interesting simply because of how this visualization method has been already used for handling other extremely large data sets; DNA microarrays. Just take a look http://www.stanford.edu/group/cyert/