This is really neat–basically a treemap visualization of Google News… Click on the link, and then (for example), click on the little box next to “UK” in the upper right.
http://www.marumushi.com/apps/newsmap/newsmap.cfm
Now there are two boxes (left=UK, right=US) with a bunch of different news stories in them. The height of each colored bar (the different colors are categories, key at the bottom) represents the relative size of each category (as represented by the total number of articles Google News puts in that category for that country), and the width of each story represents the relative “importance” of that story vs. others (again by number of articles)… Lets you see cool things, like the red bar (world news) is thicker in UK vs. US–so the UK news media focuses relatively more on the world than the US media. This is totally nerdy, but really neat…
Dang, you beat me to it, Steve! How am I supposed to catch Kyle in number of posts like this?
I added a picture to the original post, hope you don’t mind…it’s an important enough concept that I want to make sure it’s seen.
Can we put this on an E@S screen? I’d love to see the reaction…
Great idea with the picture, I didn’t think about that… That’d be a pretty cool experiment, to just have this displayed on random screens around campus–kind of a live feed of “what’s important in the news right now…”
There’s an infovis contest coming up, in case people want to do more cool stuff like this:
http://www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/iv04contest/index.html