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

Better than TV!

[z0ink]

This is truely the new wave in watching the news!

what's new about this?

[ccweigle]

What's new since April?

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 ??

This is new?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:IPO Publicity Stunt?

[LostCluster]

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.

Not as good as newsmap.. slashmap?

[thatguywhoiam]

I've been using newsmap every day since I first noticed it. It's a fantastic first stop of the day to see, at a glance, just what the hell is going on in the world (oh, and oyu can deactivate topics like Sports, which I think is great.. amazing how much more you can see of real news when you take that out).

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...)

Re:IPO Publicity Stunt?

[mrpuffypants]

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.

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 /. and discussed already on any tech-aware blog many times over.

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?

SmartMoney Map of the Market : inspiration

[Geartest.com]

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.