Another cool Google news visualization

June 9, 2004 4:28 PM

A couple months back, there was a cool flash-based front-end to Google News that displayed topics and their relative importance based on size. Now comes another visualization that's a little bit more abstract, but can be used in the same way, to get "a picture" of what the world considered news on any given day (and it has archives). Slick stuff, rollover all the colored boxes to see topics and click to see archived data.
posted by mathowie (9 comments total)

They're both cool to look at, but I don't see a practical application. They are far to cluttered to offer a meaningful overview of anything but the most basic (and thus most obvious) trends in the media. Still, a good idea.
posted by Grod at 4:37 PM on June 9, 2004

My own offering to the news analysis memething:

http://www.flatfeetpete.com/ytrack/index.html
Apologies to those who've seen this before. And for the speed of the site. And for the second self link this week.

It tracks the news pictures people are mailing to each other on yahoo. It seems perl and gd making jpg's isn't very hip at the moment. Swish flash magic's where it's at. :(. I guess it would make my lines smoother.

I've got just over a years worth of data and thumbnails now, but haven't worked out anyhing cool to do with them.
posted by Flat Feet Pete at 5:04 PM on June 9, 2004

Data Visualization is such a cool field of study.
posted by Fupped Duck at 6:09 PM on June 9, 2004

There are cool, and I'm glad people are making them. Mass media and information consumption/production is an interest of mine. The problem with these visualizations is that they imply Google News is representative of a mediascape. I don't think that's true. They are great representations of what appear on Google News, not necessarily what appear in the media. I realize the counter to that is Google News is an aggregrator, not a producer. The problem is articles get dropped by aggregators -- that's part of the function of aggregation.

What I'd like to see, to get around this problem a bit, is the ability to break down words or phrases by media outlet. If all we get to look at it is Google News, then we could study that really closely. It'd be especially useful to study an issue of the NYT or a weeks worth of the WSJ in one gander.

Do any of these do television or radio transcripts? I guess I'm asking if Google gets them, which I don't think they do.
posted by raaka at 6:10 PM on June 9, 2004

For instance, click Ronald Reagan on June 9. The response seems to imply their is more media focus on "Frank Gardner" and "Nancy Reagan" than "Ronald Reagan". Five minutes of cable news would show otherwise.
posted by raaka at 6:16 PM on June 9, 2004

HAahah -- he's making changes as I type.
posted by raaka at 6:17 PM on June 9, 2004

It's important to remember that google news itself is a pretty sophisticated visualization.
posted by ph00dz at 8:11 PM on June 9, 2004

How are these web apps (newsmap and stamen:google news) developed and created? Only with actionscript? Perhaps something else running in the background?
posted by quam at 9:22 PM on June 9, 2004

There's the raw xml for it here. It looks like the flash sucks in xml and produce the visualisation.

Tasty.
posted by Flat Feet Pete at 10:23 PM on June 9, 2004