Newsmap: Google News With A Color-Coded Treemap Visualization [Web]
The internet is a great communication tool, but day after day, we find ourselves constantly dealing with an overwhelming quantity of information. Newsmap is an web application that tries to manage the large amounts of data available online, by visually reflecting the constantly changing landscape of the Google News aggregator. It displays news in a tree map visualization that basically are space-constrained visualizations of information. This smart tool represents patterns of news and shows us how it constantly is changing around the globe. You will find large colorful cells consisting of news items on the website. At first, the page might seem a bit cluttered, but you will quickly understand the idea when you spend some time on the site. The size of each cell is determined by the amount of related articles that exist on Google News. In this way, users can quickly identify popular news stories with the most coverage.
Newsmap color codes nes items so that you can easily identify which category a news piece belongs to. For instance, red means world news, yellow means national, blue sports, green for technology, purple for entertainment and so on. The intensity of a color determines when that news item was published, brighter colors mean fresher items, whereas lighter colors represent older ones. When you hover your mouse over a box, a tiny pop-up appears with a thumbnail of an image and a description. Moreover, the service allows you to enable or disable different categories for news from the bottom of the page, and you can even select countries from the top. Some of the countries included are USA, UK, Australia, France, India, Spain, Germany and various others. Note that the larger a rectangle, the more popular the story is on Google News. At the right-corner of the page you will also find a search box, where you can enter a query and get quick search results. At the very top you will notice small tabs each with a country name. Selecting one of these tabs displays news from that country. At the top right is a button that looks something like a window and lets you switch to full screen mode.
If you want to fully customize Newsmap and want it to remember your preferences, then you can register and set up an account with the service. After that, you can, for instance, change the fonts, hide previews, hide thumbnail images and more from the settings. All in all, Newsmap is a nice service that allows you to view and read news in a unique and interesting way. The web app takes some time to load and might not work too well on a slow connection
