Pick up a newspaper and what do you see, at a very first glance? Words. Black type on white. An image or two. Perhaps a big headline catches your eye and you read it; it registers in your mind as Big News. You read a few more articles. Now you know a subset of today's news, but little more.
Seems to me that a whole lot of information is falling through the cracks, and online news sources are not much better. Google News tried to create a richer news experience, by aggregating news from different sources and by organizing stories topically, but it wasn't a huge improvement.
Here are a few more interesting approaches:
Newsmap.jp I just discovered today, and it's quite smart: it displays all news on a single screen, color-coded by topic, with the biggest stories occupying the most real estate. The user can either search for a specific story, or filter based on topic, recency and geography.
Another conceptually interesting news site is BreakingNewsMap, which pinpoints breaking news on a world map in real time...
Unfortunately, despite its theoretical coolness, in practice it's too scattered and conveys information far too slowly (just one story every couple of seconds), so the user gets no sense for the big picture. I could imagine idly following it for a minute or so, but I would get frustrated pretty quickly.
What I want to see is a combination of the two... I like the idea of putting news on a map, but I want to see more stories at once, color-coded based on topic, featured more or less prominently based on how much buzz they're generating. I want to be able to apply filters to my news. I want to zoom in from national/world news to local and hyper-local news. Oh, and I want images too!
All you geniuses out there, make it happen!
