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."
Where is Slashdot on the map?
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.
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
..no, literally. its made up of old news..
Starsucks
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
I should start a website, beertracker.org, to keep track of my daily buzz.
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.
1. Map out the world in x and y coordinates.
2. Feed google buzz data into huge neural network.
3. Predict location and magnitude of future events.
4. ???
5. Profit!
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.
New Google mappings
Goo mapping news
Mapping new Googles
New mapping goggles
Have you read my blog lately?
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?
It's just a screenshot from the NORAD command center!
- 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.
Too bad. They have it already.
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 haven't they done this with porn and geographically linking ip addresses?
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.
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.
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?
One draws maps with red circles on them.
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! --
www.paulrademacher.com/housing
A cool combination of Craigslist housing listing and Google maps. Seems to be very well done.
find / -name "*.sig" | xargs rm
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!
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.
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."
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.
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)?
Well, if you want to break into the journalism world, but you don't watch or read the news, this might help you get the gist of where you can go for news.
Alternatively, if you want to make a big splash with decent news coverage, don't try to do it near one of the big red dots, because there's already too much going on there.