Mapping Google News 133
CousinLarry writes "A neat project called Buzztracker.org has been mining Google News for over a year and keeping track of relationships between geographic locations mentioned in articles.
The results are some really cool maps that actually seem to reflect the "buzz" of the day - check out the Vatican clusters from earlier this month, or the global New Year's chatter. You can also dig down into the articles from which the maps were generated."
Definitely on the Nifty List (Score:2, Interesting)
The guys at Buzztracker desrve a cookie (edible variety).
virtual sightseeing (Score:4, Interesting)
http://perljam.net/notes/interesting-google-satell ite-maps/ [perljam.net]
-ted
Spam tracks current events too (Score:3, Interesting)
Nelson Mandela != Nelson town (Score:5, Interesting)
Does Google mind? (Score:4, Interesting)
Animations (Score:4, Interesting)
Someone wanna join? This cries 'distributed database'...
This is pretty nifty (Score:5, Interesting)
- find where there are lots of new jobs being generated
- view up-and-coming areas by their positive "buzz" (new creative hot spots, architecture, etc...)
- find areas of town with great new restaurants
I think this is where it starts to get exciting (and more useful). Mapping Google news? Meh. Mapping the northwest, and giving that information to Citysearch? You betcha.Through With Buzz (Score:4, Interesting)
but google news API is not available yet, is it? (Score:3, Interesting)
I wish I had more details...
And this is a REALLY stupid aspect to tackle--connections between cities.
THe real cheese would seem to be in word counts, and connections between words--like "economy" and "recession", etc.
Why do we need this? (Score:3, Interesting)
A map that showed where the stories getting the least attention that contained certain keywords - famine, Schiavo, wobbegong, whatever - came from would strike me as more interesting.
We already know where the stories indicated by this map are coming from, because they're taking up ridiculous amounts of space on the front pages of newspapers everywhere.
Re:New Business Plan! (Score:3, Interesting)
New, much better business model than the old one of sell your business to M$ or Intel. Why better business model? Who would you rather work for?
The need for maps that show where news is not from (Score:2, Interesting)
Exactly. If it hadn't been for the Tsunami, would we have seen as many stories from adjacent countries, for example?
Just because it's not reported, doesn't make it not news. It's just that our filters screen out things that aren't the latest thing.
Animate it! (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Animations (Score:2, Interesting)
Indeed, I see lots of interesting possibilities for mapping and animating data like this on the web.
In fact, after the last election I had a nifty idea to create some sort of animated map of the US showing how political affiliations have geographically shifted over the years (primarily, the North slowly turning blue and the South slowly turning red). Then I started to think about extending that to a generic web app to display and animate various demographic data. Basically, a very dumbed down and animated online GIS.
It really would've been somewhat trivial to throw together with Flash, pulling in XML data streams. My biggest stumbling block ended up being finding a nice raw map of the US in vector format, either at the county level or even state level.
Anyone happen to know of a good source for free vector maps that can be easily imported into Flash?
Re:please tell us more! (and that link is dead.... (Score:3, Interesting)
From the text (how did I get marked redundant in my first post, even if I did screw up the url somehow):
In the hope that these events have resulted from your inadvertence rather than your deliberate actions, we propose the following:
1. We demand that you cease and desist using our search service in a manner that is not authorized by our Terms of Service. This includes, but is not limited to, (1) no longer sending automated queries to www.google.com, or other affiliated sites, and (2) no longer using search results from
www.google.com or other affiliated sites, except in accordance with our terms of service and this letter. This applies to the GoogleNews menubar interface to Google News as well as any other products or sites that you operate or control.
2. We demand that you cease and desist using the mark GoogleNews or any other mark or name that incorporates our famous GOOGLE mark or any similar marks.
3. If you remain interested in providing our award-winning search services to your users, we suggest you visit the variety of programs we offer at http://www.google.com/services/.
Newsmap (Score:1, Interesting)
Gaza is in Palestine. As well as Jordan and Israel (Score:0, Interesting)
It is quite confusing to use the name of Palestine nowadays, when the map of the region changes so dramaticlly. For example, before 1922, British Palestine included the territories not only of the modern Israel but also that of the Kingdom of Jordan! In 1949 Gaza and Judea/Samaria (the latter often referred to as the West Bank) were occupied in 1949 by Egypt and Jordan respectively.
As to the real source of all of the problems in the Middle East, hardly it is the situation with the Palestinian Arabs (which you probably mean here), but instead it a complex combination of problems, including lack of industrial development in the region, complete lack of democracy, extremely levels of education, low level of life, religious fanatism, and corrupted regimes of the Arab nations of the region.