Slashdot Mirror
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."
This is by far one of the most interesting uses of data-mining I've seen in while. Neat to see what are the hotspots, as far as news goes, in the world.
The guys at Buzztracker desrve a cookie (edible variety).
You can't defeat physics.
http://perljam.net/notes/interesting-google-satell ite-maps/
-ted
I've noticed an upsurge in "Living Willing" spam since the Terry Schiavo story and even a few Pope-related offers.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
It looks like the code needs a bit more tuning. http://www.buzztracker.org/index.html lists Nelson, NZ, as one of the hot spots. Clicking on that lists a bunch of articles about apartheid. I think the site code misinterpreted a reference to Nelson Mandela in one of the articles.
I remember about a year ago or so, there was a guy who was mining google news to produce an RSS feed. IIRC, google politely demanded that individual stop offering this to people. I can't find the article to cite this, maybe someone can help? At any rate, I wonder how google will feel about this.
Now, take the data and put up some nice animations, archive the first 100 articles or so and put it into some nice database to mine for interesting stuff. Should not be too hard to script together the data gathering, you can already start fetching stuff while developing the functionality and frontend.
;)
Someone wanna join? This cries 'distributed database'...
Who is General Failure and why is he reading my hard disk?
- find where there are lots of new jobs being generated
- view up-and-coming areas by their positive "buzz" (new creative hot spots, architecture, etc...)
- find areas of town with great new restaurants
I think this is where it starts to get exciting (and more useful). Mapping Google news? Meh. Mapping the northwest, and giving that information to Citysearch? You betcha.concrete5: a cms made for marketing, but strong enough for geeks.
The big circle in the US is called "Washington", which is rated at 03%. It obscures "New York" in the GUI. Boston is available, and the only other US buzz is Grand Rapids, apparently on the strength of a local paper's report 2 days ago of a resident killed in Cairo. I find all that hard to believe, or at least to make into any sense. The GUI is unusable, and the mapping of data to "reality" defies sensibility. I think the buzz has gone to their heads, and they should put the pipe down quick.
--
make install -not war
How are they parsing google news content? Google news does not yet offer an API, correct? What are they doing, screen scraping? You can only query google programmatically about 1000 times a day, I think.
I wish I had more details...
And this is a REALLY stupid aspect to tackle--connections between cities.
THe real cheese would seem to be in word counts, and connections between words--like "economy" and "recession", etc.
eat shiat and bark at the moon
Why do we need this?
A map that showed where the stories getting the least attention that contained certain keywords - famine, Schiavo, wobbegong, whatever - came from would strike me as more interesting.
We already know where the stories indicated by this map are coming from, because they're taking up ridiculous amounts of space on the front pages of newspapers everywhere.
4 = Sell your business and services to Google.
New, much better business model than the old one of sell your business to M$ or Intel. Why better business model? Who would you rather work for?
My little site.
We already know where the stories indicated by this map are coming from, because they're taking up ridiculous amounts of space on the front pages of newspapers everywhere.
Exactly. If it hadn't been for the Tsunami, would we have seen as many stories from adjacent countries, for example?
Just because it's not reported, doesn't make it not news. It's just that our filters screen out things that aren't the latest thing.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
It would be interesting to watch an animation of where the Buzz is over a period of time.
Sig, we don't need no stinking Sig!
It's actually both:
From the text (how did I get marked redundant in my first post, even if I did screw up the url somehow):
In the hope that these events have resulted from your inadvertence rather than your deliberate actions, we propose the following:
1. We demand that you cease and desist using our search service in a manner that is not authorized by our Terms of Service. This includes, but is not limited to, (1) no longer sending automated queries to www.google.com, or other affiliated sites, and (2) no longer using search results from
www.google.com or other affiliated sites, except in accordance with our terms of service and this letter. This applies to the GoogleNews menubar interface to Google News as well as any other products or sites that you operate or control.
2. We demand that you cease and desist using the mark GoogleNews or any other mark or name that incorporates our famous GOOGLE mark or any similar marks.
3. If you remain interested in providing our award-winning search services to your users, we suggest you visit the variety of programs we offer at http://www.google.com/services/.
James Tiberius Kirk: "Spock, the women on your planet are logical. No other planet in the galaxy can make that claim."
Some of you may find this interesting
"Palestine" was a name given by Romes to the province comprising several territories conquered by them - and Gaza was 100% sure among them.
It is quite confusing to use the name of Palestine nowadays, when the map of the region changes so dramaticlly. For example, before 1922, British Palestine included the territories not only of the modern Israel but also that of the Kingdom of Jordan! In 1949 Gaza and Judea/Samaria (the latter often referred to as the West Bank) were occupied in 1949 by Egypt and Jordan respectively.
As to the real source of all of the problems in the Middle East, hardly it is the situation with the Palestinian Arabs (which you probably mean here), but instead it a complex combination of problems, including lack of industrial development in the region, complete lack of democracy, extremely levels of education, low level of life, religious fanatism, and corrupted regimes of the Arab nations of the region.