Visualize the News: the marumushi newsmap

The web is full of great little apps that demonstrate innovative information architectures and designs. I was having a conversation with Silumesii from Pencilcase Studios about web designs and he showed me this neat little web app by the folks at marumushi.com in Tokyo. They developed a flash newsmap that presents the changing contents of the Google News news aggregator in something that looks like a tag cloud. Each headline is tagged with a category and contained in a color-coded container. The color of the container denotes the subject category: red for world, purple for health, green for technology, etc.

By hovering over the container with your mouse, you can find out how many articles feature this headline in the Google News news aggregator. The flash app refreshes its feeds every couple of minutes, adjusting the size of each headline according to its significance.

The user can select from only 11 countries, of which Japan is strangely not one. African news did not make the cut either, but that is not surprising.

I love for this web app, primarily because it represents a willingness to reconfigure the presentation of news in a format that accounts for relevance and timeliness. I would love to see something like this for the African region. Does that mean I am going to try and build it? Well, I am no expert in flash or xml, but I am curious, and that's usually how it starts.