Comments on: Treemaps for the news day

Treemaps for the news day

majcher — Tue, 30 Mar 2004 14:13:08 -0800

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.)

By: majcher

majcher — Tue, 30 Mar 2004 14:17:42 -0800

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.

By: onlyconnect

onlyconnect — Tue, 30 Mar 2004 14:23:43 -0800

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!

By: milnak

milnak — Tue, 30 Mar 2004 14:33:52 -0800

Usenet treemap from Microsoft Research

By: chaz

chaz — Tue, 30 Mar 2004 14:40:58 -0800

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.

By: zpousman

zpousman — Tue, 30 Mar 2004 14:42:29 -0800

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.

By: mathowie

mathowie — Tue, 30 Mar 2004 14:43:47 -0800

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.

By: zpousman

zpousman — Tue, 30 Mar 2004 14:56:59 -0800

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.]

By: davidmsc

davidmsc — Tue, 30 Mar 2004 17:33:39 -0800

majcher, this is a Beautiful Thing. Thank you.

By: quam

quam — Tue, 30 Mar 2004 19:01:59 -0800

Really nice. Does someone have insight how this is generated? My guess is that it would be something more than Cold Fusion, or not?

By: raaka

raaka — Tue, 30 Mar 2004 19:07:37 -0800

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.

By: majcher

majcher — Tue, 30 Mar 2004 19:22:21 -0800

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.

By: hashashin

hashashin — Tue, 30 Mar 2004 21:28:13 -0800

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.