Treemaps for the news day

March 30, 2004 2:13 PM

NewsFilter.I'm a sucker for treemap applications. This one is pretty neat - it gives you a good visual overview of the days' news, with a handful of filtering options, and live updating. I've had this running full-screen on a second monitor all day, and I'm digging it. (First link requires Flash.)
posted by majcher (12 comments total)

It does not, however, help you with renegade apostrophes.

Another fun thing that the newsmap allows you to do is compare the headlines from different countries - say, the UK and Canada right next to the US. A little hard to read sometimes, but somewhat enlightening, nonetheless.
posted by majcher at 2:17 PM on March 30, 2004

That's a pretty cool way to get all the headlines at once. A few of the headlines are just too tiny to read (even when I eliminate sports!), but by and large this is a helpful little tool. Thanks!
posted by onlyconnect at 2:23 PM on March 30, 2004

Usenet treemap from Microsoft Research
posted by milnak at 2:33 PM on March 30, 2004

Cool, great find! I can't see myself using it every day, but it's a nifty app and I will check it out from time to time. I would love to be watching it when some really big news breaks.
posted by chaz at 2:40 PM on March 30, 2004

TreeMaps Rulez!

SmartMoney "Map of the Market"

US Stock Market (apparently more than the S&P 500, it does 600+ stocks) on a single monitor. The encoding works like this. The bigger the area, the bigger the market cap of the company (MSFT is about 10x APPL). The colors are from bright green to dark green to black to dark red to bright red. They map to "Up a lot" (Bright Green - 5% or higher) to "unchanged" (black) to "Down a lot" (Bright Red - Down 5% or more). Pretty sweet.
posted by zpousman at 2:42 PM on March 30, 2004

I like seeing a treemap in flash vs. most of the java ones out there. Very slick.

But I wish it could surface the clustering around a story, let me click a headline and have it go full-screen, with all the related articles, maybe with the publication name and short summary highlighted before jumping off to the article.
posted by mathowie at 2:43 PM on March 30, 2004

Caveat Clicker: The SmartMoney map is a slllllooooooow loading java app! But it's pretty stable on my system (Mac OSX 10.3.3) and it loads much faster once it's been cached.

[Thanks Matt, for a forgotten warning.]
posted by zpousman at 2:56 PM on March 30, 2004

majcher, this is a Beautiful Thing. Thank you.
posted by davidmsc at 5:33 PM on March 30, 2004

Really nice.
Does someone have insight how this is generated? My guess is that it would be something more than Cold Fusion, or not?
posted by quam at 7:01 PM on March 30, 2004

you're a thief and a liar and a thief

it looks similiar to paula scher's thing on cable news in the j/f issue of print.
posted by raaka at 7:07 PM on March 30, 2004

Does someone have insight how this is generated?

I'm guessing that their backend (the coldfusion/java part) grabs suff from Google News, and generates a big chunk of XML, which describes the categories, story titles, summaries, number of links, and so on. They send the XML to the Flash movie, which generates the treemap. Not particularly heavy lifting on either end, but still a pretty nifty application of the technology.
posted by majcher at 7:22 PM on March 30, 2004

It seems like the size of the different rows (world, nation, business, tech, sports, entertainment, health) varies based on how much coverage those subjects get in the selected country?

I notice that when I select the US, national news is the biggest row and health is tiny, whereas on Canada, India and NZ the national row is miniscule and world news takes up almost half the chart.

Also when I select all the countries at once, they take up different amounts of screen width, perhaps based on the number of stories in each edition? But then it really is far too small to read anything.
posted by hashashin at 9:28 PM on March 30, 2004