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Mapping Google News
CousinLarry writes "A neat project called Buzztracker.org has been mining Google News for over a year and keeping track of relationships between geographic locations mentioned in articles.
The results are some really cool maps that actually seem to reflect the "buzz" of the day - check out the Vatican clusters from earlier this month, or the global New Year's chatter. You can also dig down into the articles from which the maps were generated."
SEMANTIC WEB!
/. reader. The question remains, while it's very interesting (and cool), what does one do with the aggregated data?
Thank you Tim (Berners-Lee) Didn't know you were a
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
Well when you think about it aren't those the exact places you'd expect to be hotspots?
What a cool site, and it works very quickly and is not overflowing with advertising crap?
Acting stupid isn't much fun when there's someone around who knows better
Apparently they didn't Google their own name, or else they would've noticed the name was already in use for a fairly popular music composition program.
Bears don't normally eat things that talk and move backwards.
If, they represented this in hierarchical format, the middle east would dominate by picking up points from children Gaza, West Bank and Palestine (not to mention Iraq). Baghdad is probably a good example here. How much actually happens in areas outside of Baghdad proper but gets labled baghdad anyhow.
Who are you? The new #2 Who is #1? You are #617565. I am not a number, I am a free man! Muhahaha.
I've had the thought that it might be cool to implement an anti-news site that would do something like show you links to New York Times stories that have never been referenced by the top page of Google News.
How long until Google invites the creators to join the team for coming up with such a great idea? Or failing that, aquire the rights to the concept and implement it.
Google have a habit of doing great things with software they get hold of, can't wait to see what they do with this.
How many people can read hex if only you and dead people can read hex?
What we have here is one computer algorithm aggregating another computer algorithm's assessment of "newsworthy," with no provision for hindsight or fluff-vs-historical weighting. It's a neat idea, and the graphics are pretty slick, but I don't see any real value here.
This map isn't accurate. You're not reporting on the news. You're reporting on what made headlines. There's a big, big difference.
More people are murdered in Detroit than in than in Baghdad or the surrounding area.
More Americans are kidnapped in Mexico in 3 days than in Iraq in a months' time.
Isn't Mexico supposed to be a friendly country?
Why does the press ONLY focus on Iraq?
Clinton sent us into Bosnia. In fact, we're still there, and the only improvement was the arrest of Milosevic. Since then, they've had as many troubles as they had before. Why doesn't the press report this?
The truth is, the press is HEAVILY biased. They all take their lead from the NY Times, and the NY Times is as biased a newspaper as biased can be.
In fact, after the last election I had a nifty idea to create some sort of animated map of the US showing how political affiliations have geographically shifted over the years (primarily, the North slowly turning blue and the South slowly turning red). Then I started to think about extending that to a generic web app to display and animate various demographic data. Basically, a very dumbed down and animated online GIS.
This sounds like it would be most easily done with a Worldwind Add-on!
- Chuq
I understand your point, however I think it is partially based on a false premise: In reguard to Nov 3rd. The site tracks cities, not states.
After checking Dec 26, 27, 28, and 29th they do have Indonesia, but it doesn't show up until the 28th (and then under Jakarta only). I would guess this is due to them not having Sumatra or Banda Aceh in their keyword search system.
I also notice that most cities in the US other then Washington and New York seem to almost never show up - could it be that their "selection of articles" is a bit limited (refering to the above's 2nd paragraph)?