NewsMap

Via BoingBoing, we find this amazing tool that renders news as a 2-D map. From the creator’s notes:

The GoogleNews aggregator is an amazing piece of software, not only aggregates almost every single online newspaper, but it also combines news stories into clusters so that when the same story is repeated among several news sites, it files and displays only one to you – no mater how different the actual text that makes the article is. Even the same story, told from completely different points of view, gets filed as one single entry.

Newsmap utilizes a treemap algorithm to dynamically create each view, and the size of each cell is determined by the amount of related articles that exist inside each news cluster.

This does for breaking news what MusicPlasma did for music–depict a lot of data in a way that’s easy to consume.