Newsmap launches
My friend Marcos Weskamp has finally released his Newsmap application, an amazing information visualising tool. Here is how he presents it:
Newsmap is an application that visualizes the totality of the GoogleNews aggregator. The GoogleNews aggregator is an amazing piece of software, not only aggregates almost every single online newspaper, but it also combines news stories into clusters so that when the same story is repeated among several news sites, it files and displays only one to you - no mater how different the actual text that makes the article is. Even the same story, told from completely different points of view, get's filed as one single entry.
Google news aggreagates stories in several languages and customizes its content for 10 particular countries. I've loved googlenews for this particular reason since the first day, and it was then when I started thinking about visualizing the totality of it, since it could be a very close approach to getting a picture on how news media attention differs from country to country.I am particularly interested in the colour coding of the different topics. I would love to see that re-used in print. You could flip through a newspaper and look for a precise colour rahter than scan all the titles until you found one that you liked (regardless of the page topics). I am also interested in the brightness of the colour, highlighting how fresh the piece of news is. That would be rather irrelevant in the case of newspapers where news are already hours old when you read them, but it could be re-used to signify whether a piece of news (developing over several days) is getting more or less coverage that day than the previous one.
Now Marcos, what about adding a feature that would let us filter in or out the news sources... Let's say I only wanted to see the news coming from NYTimes Online and the Herald Tribune Online.
Try it now, I recommend you to view all the countries at the same time and compare how they treat information.
2 Comments added
When I was designing an online newspaper one of the things I wanted to implement was color coding for the freshness of the story.
The colors would not have related to the article's category, since articles could belong to multiple categories(although discouraged.)
However I decided against it for an non-technical reason. We as humans often relate freshness to quality. An older article is not as relevant as a newer one.
There is often no merit to this reasoning, but is nevertheless something we do, whether we want to or not.
So my message is this, if you are a designer and wish to incorporate "freshness" into an article/item/object do so understanding how it may affect the user's uninformed opinion on said object. And try to minimize that affect.
Hey Paul,
Thanks for your comments. yes, definitively more filtering/search options should be added. There's a lot to be worked out there yet. I actually had a zooming version of it, so that you could actually go deep into the map and pan through the whole thing. Unfortunatelly it was really cpu intensive and had to decide to drop it out.
On the color coding, maybe it's more useful to display popularity fluctuation instead of freshnes. If one item is gaining attention in the media then it could be dislpayed with a higher value.
I agree that displaying freshness may be slightly disleading. Still remember that newsmap never pretended to be a tool to display an unbiased view of the google news aggregator - googlenews is actually made with that in mind. Rather than that the idea behind newsmap is to accentuate the bias in the "unbiased" view of the aggregator.
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