Had to share this take on displaying news... but put your thinking caps on - it takes a little to get your head around.
Newsmap is an application that visually reflects the size and dimensions of news appearing on the Google News aggregator. So in the image above, the size of the square indicates the number of related articles about that story - so the bigger the square, the bigger the story.
Newsmap displays categories of information by colours - khaki is sports, pink is health, green is technology, aqua is entertainment, purple is business etc. And the lighter the shade of the colour, the more recent the story is.
Newsmaps can be generated on content up to a week old, and by six hourly intervals.
When presented together the underlying patterns in news reporting across cultures and within news segments in constant change around the globe is displayed.
The biggest news story at the time of writing about Tiger Woods' play-off in the US Open, with 4775 related articles.
Newsmap claim:
Newsmap does not pretend to replace the googlenews aggregator. Its objective is to simply demonstrate visually the relationships between data and the unseen patterns in news media. It is not thought to display an unbiased view of the news; on the contrary, it is thought to ironically accentuate the bias of it.
Now, doesn't that last sentence really get you thinking?! Look how much sports news (represented in the khaki shades above) dominates the screen.
Head on over to Newsmap and have a play - it's free and it's fascinating.
Tracking the media, monitoring the message
