Tobias Escher at the OII

No, this post does not refer to the infamous British newspaper that made Mr. Murdoch rich (I cannot even bother to link to these people as Google would count that as a recommendation) but this is about different approaches on visualizing geographical aspects of news.

First, there is the BBC which visualizes what are the most popular stories on their sites for users from different continents:

Ok. But what about the news itself? If we go beyond the BBC site and look at all the news stories that are being published on the web by traditional media outlets, how are these different for different countries? Marcos Weskamp’s Newsmap can help you on that. He is using treemaps to visualize the Google News news aggregator, which produces a quick overview of what news stories are currently being published in different countries:

Well, the BBC tells us who is interested in what stories, Newsmap tells us what newsstories are popular in which country. But: where does the news actually happen? Buzztracker solves this problem and visualizes which the location of the news stories, in other words where does the stuff happen the article talks about. And as a nice addon, by analysing what location names are appearing in the same story, it also makes connections between these locations. For today, this then looks like that:

So this is surely interesting and nice to look at. Now the only question that remains is: What can it tell us, what can we use it for?