Where's The News?

August 16, 2008 10:15 AM

Where's The News?
Every day Where's The News? looks at the stories published on the front page of various newspaper websites, notes which countries are mentioned and automatically generates a map of where the news thinks the news is. So you can see at a mere glance where stuff is happening in the world. And also where the mainstream news media doesn't think anything important is happening.
posted by xchmp (4 comments total)

I had a similar idea some time ago, based upon the news interface for the Wii. Which sounds very similar to your idea here, if smaller; Taking its sources from "Nintenews", so to speak. They have a pretty slick Apple-esque interface for displaying the content:

Zoom
Global positioning of news stories
Meaningful thumbnails
Intelligent grouping and "dodging" of new balloons

Dodging: The icons - which resemble balloons hovering above the point of interest - move to take center of focus as the user hovers their pointer over the story in question; While at the same time shuffling the other balloons to the periphery of the screen.
posted by Pontifex at 12:41 PM on August 16, 2008

That's quite clever.

It would be nice if the archives were accessible without using the feed. (Or did I miss the link somewhere?)

It would also be nice to see an animation of a couple weeks of maps.
posted by enn at 12:50 PM on August 16, 2008

enn: Animation was my original goal for this, so that's definitely coming up once I have a reasonable amount of data to do it with. An archive page is also on my to-do list.
posted by xchmp at 1:20 PM on August 16, 2008

The national daily paper for the US is USA Today and might be relevant to include if you want to capture the breadth of mass media. It's the one that hotels around the country leave at your door. The paper itself is shit, though, fit for birdliner.

I like anything with maps, so I voted for you.
posted by desjardins at 7:59 PM on August 18, 2008