Newsmap

So I learned about this fun site today.

Newsmap

At the top of the screen you can select a number of different countries. At the bottom of the screen you can select a number of different news topics.

It then does a Google News query on that selection. Google news groups together related articles. Newsmap then displays those groupings grpahically. That is, articles that have very large groups are displayed as very large boxes with very large text. Articles that have few siblings are very small.

This not only gives an interesting way to survey the hottest news, but it gives a way to ask questions about the media bias on the Internet. You can see what topics are getting the most attention by the media. You can even normalize the effect to a particular subset of topics. For example, you know that science articles won't get as much interest as politics articles, so you can then ask about the hottest articles IN SCIENCE. So overall some science articles might be very small but normalizing for this given allows you to get more resolution on science articles in general.

Isn't that fun? Take a look.