NewsMap: Read Google News Stories in a Visually Appealing Interface

You have seen news aggregators and meme sites like Google News, Techmeme, Slashdot but if you want to read Google news stories on a more visually appealing  interface, here is something useful.

Enter Newsmap – a web application built entirely in flash which reflects the constantly changing landscape of Google News aggregator.

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The aim of the application is to provide an algorithmic approach for reading Google News Stories – the size of each cell is determined by the amount of related articles that exist inside a news cluster. Users can quickly identify the stories that are currently popular in Google News and read those articles which gets the maximum coverage.

You can view the map by region, date or time and the site also lets you compare the news landscape of several countries. This is useful, when you want to compare the news scenario of two countries (example : FIFA world cup 2010 is more popular in US or India and so on)

I tried the application for the entertainment section of Google News India and the results were amazingly accurate. Popular stories are organized in bigger clusters, just hover over a cluster and you can read a small excerpt of the story

You can also see the number of related articles, actual source and time when the story was included in Google News. If you are overwhelmed with the amount of information and want an easy yet attractive way to read Google News stories, it’s worth giving Newsmap a try.

And here is a quick video overview of the Newsmap application