April 2, 2004, 4.12pm • 19 comments » • 2,544 Views

Google News re-visualised

I can already hear the murmurs of mocking from the newspaper layout subs’ corner, but Newsmap is a fascinating and innovating experiment in on-screen presentation of news stories - “an application that visually reflects the constantly changing landscape of the Google News news aggregator”, says designer Marcos Weskamp, an explorer in the developing field of information visualisation.

Google News is a fascinating creature, aggregating news stories from 4,500 sources worldwide and clustering reports, even competing slants, on the same story from different publishers. It’s remarkable how the site manages to recognise competing reports as pertaining to a single story. Coupled with the product’s alerts feature, this makes it one of the most democratic news systems yet developed - why go anywhere else for quick ‘n dirty news coverage?

Now, the debate about Google News’ automatic, algorithmic prioritisation of news stories has already raged. Indeed, I’ve been surprised several times to find a story I have written which is merely a Welsh slant on a major UK or world event - say, the Iraq war - has appeared as the very top of the international front page.

At this moment, the UK front page’s top take from the 180 reports of Michael Grade’s appointment as BBC chairman is FT.com’s, which concentrates only on Grade’s subsequent departure from the board of lottery operator Camelot - much less important than his plans for the broadcaster. Criticisms aside, Google News is in beta and certainly not ready yet.

Newsmap strips Google News of the age-old top-down news prioritisation so cherished by newspapermen (and, now, online newsmen; and a concept easy for readers to understand) and asks the question: what if we turned that on its head and presented story importance through a purely visual paradigm?

A colour-coded map offers up a feed of each Google News section on a single page while the space occupied by each headline on that page increases as do the number of articles grouped in a single story cluster. So, Reuters report “Saudi Arabia Reassures Bush on Oil Supply” is the largest headline in the blue Business section while The Scotsman’s less-important report “Rising self-harm cases spark probe” is rendered much less significant - its headline type size so small that it’s virtually impossible to read without running the mouse over it. More important = bigger.
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It’s a marvellously interesting effort at representing the news agenda in its totality, throwing old conventions for directing news priorities out the window. But it does, of course, beg the question - whose news agenda?

Google this week announced efforts to offer personalisation of its basic web search, the idea being your searches will be more relevant based on a number of personal interests and characteristics you can ask the system to remember about you:

For example, music enthusiasts will see different relevant sites for a search on [bass] than people who indicate an interest in [fishing]

Sounds good. But what if that kind of personalisation was plugged into Google News? Wouldn’t we then begin to have a Daily Me generated not just by the personalisation of a single title (perhaps your favourite title), but total personalisation of the entire spectrum of online news publishing? Plug that into Newsmap and you’d have visual navigation of an utterly democratic news environment.