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28 Jan 2007
Geographic News
Last Friday the News Channel on the Wii was launched. This is a very interesting application from a MicroContent point of view, so I will discuss it in some more detail. It is a fresh approach to MicroContent Clients.
First of all the News itself. News can be seen as MicroContent. Each Item consists of a title, the text, optionally an image, a category and a location. One could discern more fields, but the Wii does not really do something with it, such as the date or the origin of the news (mostly Associated Press). The interesting thing here is a location, which is made explicit in a news Item as the opening words of the text.
The View-pane consists of two parts: on the left the news item and on the right part of the globe with a circle indicating the place of the Item. The Item shows the title, the originator of the Item, the location of the Item and the text. If there is no location available for an Item the part with the globe is not visible and the Item fills the entire screen. With the plus and minus buttons on the Wiimote the user can increase or decrease the font size of the Item. A nice touch is that one sees each word moving and finding a new place on the screen depending on its new place on a line. Very nice. Scrolling works by pushing B and moving the Wiimote up and down. If there is an image attached to an Item it shows in the top right corner of the text part. Clicking on the image shows it full screen.
The 'Items-pane', i.e. the screens where one has a overview of a set of Items exists in two modes: a tabular mode and a geographic mode. The tabular mode shows the titles of the Items as rows and one can scroll through the Items. Clicking on a title will reveal the Item as discussed before. If an images is associated with an Item, it shows up as small thumbnail on the Item line.
However the geographic is much more interesting. It offers a new approach to news. One can select what one wants to see by geography. Each Item shows up on the globe as small icon and in the case of an associated image, one sees the image as thumbnail. One can zoom in and out on the globe. Zooming in will spread the Items over the globe, depending on the location information. Zooming out will stack the Items in a single location. I did not figure out what the algorithm behind it. Naturally one can turn the globe to find other Items. One can also tilt the globe in order to see the news in perspective.
All the Items are categorised into Lists such as International News, Regional News, Local News, Sports, etc. This seems a hierarchical system, i.e. an Item can only live in a single category (have to check that better). This is 'list-pane' is also the opening screen of the Wii News application.
Finally there is a Show-mode. In this mode the titles of a selected category are shown in combination with the location of the Item on the globe. Nice if one wants to see the news flash by.
I have a mixed experience with the news itself. What one sees depends a lot of the language set in the Wii. The English setting offers a lot more news than the French setting, which offers a lot more news than the Dutch setting. The news seems to be limited to news from Associated Press. I am not sure how ell they cover the earth and publish in multiple languages. I still have to play with this. The locations of the Items seem to focus on the larger cities, although I did see some very small places. Looks like they still need to act together on this.
All in all a very interesting MicroContent Client. A totally other way to look and play with the news. Still have to wait a few months to figure out whether it is also useful in practice.