Information Display
July 5th, 2006
Recently I’ve came across some websites and projects which have as only purpose to present us in visual terms, information they gather from other websites or news sources. They simply aggregate them and present those information bits in some highly graphical way… today I just noticed Newsmap:
Newsmap is an application that visually reflects the constantly changing landscape of the Google News news aggregator. (…) provides a tool to divide information into quickly recognizable bands which, when presented together, reveal underlying patterns in news reporting across cultures and within news segments in constant change around the globe
Strangely enough, at the beginning seems a messy representation, but the colors and sizes became addictive quite easily.
Entry Filed under: Information Architechture, Tech News, Usability
Tags: tag, googlenews, information, usability, remix, flash, news
2 Comments Add your own
1. Hugo Fernandes | July 5th, 2006 at 5:51 pm
I had the opportunity to see and hear Marcos Wescamp, Newsmap’s author, in OFFF Barcelona last May.
He talked about this project and told a funny (or not) strory.
Onde day he emailed Google team showing his work on Newsmap and received a crisp answer. They threatned him with a law process because he used information containded in GoogleNews to do this work, they said. The funny thing (or not) about this is that GoogleNews does NOT have private content and obtains the information just the same way Newsmap obtains it!
Marcos just answered: “Ok. Bye bye.”
2. sab | July 5th, 2006 at 6:33 pm
Those type of maps are called treemaps.
More info at Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treemap).
I use Spacemonger to check my disk space (it is very good, and very small) http://www.werkema.com/software/spacemonger.html
There is toons of more info at http://www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/treemap-history/index.shtml.
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