NewsIsFree Visualisation

The NewsIsFree service has an interesting visualisation of the news. They categorised the news in eight categories and you can visualise each category separately. The visualisation presents a large rectangle and each news-item has a square. The location in the rectangle. its colour and size of the square is used to analyse the news-item. You can choose your own code based on popularity, age and source. Mousing over a square shows a summary of the article.

It is not the first example of such a visualisation service and I still doubt whether it is useful. I like the possibility to see the news in a single view. I however prefer the news as an order list, possibly with some popularity ranking. If you want to do tracking and want to discover what is new, important or popular, this is a good way to go.

[inspiration Om Malik]