Newsmap
My colleague Brent Bingham sent me an interesting link to a site called Newsmap by Marcos Weskamp:
http://www.marumushi.com/apps/newsmap/newsmap.cfm
It’s an application that runs on top of the Google News Feed and visually characterizes stories by geography, category, popularity, and age. Colors represent category, and shading represents age — the breaking news is brightest. The typographical size of the story headline represents popularity. It’s a beautifully dense view of the news, and reminded me of some of Professor Tufte’s principles.
There are some other applications at Marcos’ site that appear to be worth exploring.