Chronological News Popularity: Stamen Time-Visualizes Google News

If you are into data visualization and appreciate the value of information design, you may want to explore this new experimental work in providing more effective access to news via a visual interface. In The News, a newsdata visualization experiment carried out by Michal Migurski of Stamen Design, provides some innovative and interesting solutions to enhance our ability to access large stacs of news information across time. In The News can be defined to be a "near-realtime cumulative view of Google's "In The News" sidebar organized by date and popularity. This data visualisation experiment is intended to give a high-level view of who's making news at the moment, and who made the news at specified times in the past. While I was working on it, I saw the excellent newsmap, a project that gives an instantaneous overview of Google's headlines, rather than the time-linked information I've been collecting. The size of each color chip refers to the relative amount of coverage an item has received on Google News on a given day, based on total appearances in the "In The News" sidebar (check out Google News page and find the "In The News" small box on the right side of the page) sampled every quarter-hour." The colors of the individual chips indicate whether a news item has just gained more attention share from news sources relative to the previous day(bright green) or if it has lost it (red). Clicking on any of the colored news tiles shows a "sparkline" showing the "performance" of that news item over the last 30 days. Textual links superimposed on the graph facilitate access to the last seven days, help you move forward by days or weeks and highlight the most popular news topics. In my view, the present visualization approach leaves still a lot of margin for improvement, and rethinking how the display is organized and how news items are presented would create the opportunity to produce another great information access tool to complement the excellent pioneering work done by the newsmap.