Treemapping the world’s news
March 31st, 2004newsmap is a Flash app that takes the news stories being aggregated by Google News and creates a graphical space-based representation called a treemap of the data - the larger the area of each story, the more widely covered it is. Thus it shows what the world is currently reporting on in a simple graphical format. Extra features like colour-coding stories by freshness, classifying by country and being able to compare different time periods, as well as a pretty UI, make it quite cool. Similar apps for what blogs are linking to (e.g. by reading the RSS feeds from Blogdex or Technorati) would be a nice derivative.
(via the immensely fab Boing Boing)