March 30, 2004

a map of the news media

just finished killing the last bug I had in my list before releasing this new project. 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 it's 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. Newsmap utilizes a treemap algorithm to dynamically create each view, and the size of each cell is determined by the amount of related articles that exist inside each news cluster. this could have never been finished without the invaluable help of Dan and Gus - thanks a lot guys! launch the project over here