I've been blissfully unaware of Newsmap, a web-based tool that presents Google News in a visual way, similar to a tag cloud.
Given that Google is purposefully very text-based and very black-text-on-white-background, the map is an interesting tool.
It assigns greater visual size for news items that are popular in the past day.
Marcos Weskamp, a designer in Tokyo who created Newsmap describes it:
Newsmap is an application that visually reflects the constantly changing landscape of the Google News news aggregator. A treemap visualization algorithm helps display the enormous amount of information gathered by the aggregator. Treemaps are traditionally space-constrained visualizations of information. Newsmap's objective takes that goal a step further and provides a tool to divide information into quickly recognizable bands which, when presented together, reveal underlying patterns in news reporting across cultures and within news segments in constant change around the globe.
Newsmap does not pretend to replace the googlenews aggregator. It's 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.
Thanks to Dan Misener for the link.
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