Newsmap

If you haven’t seen it yet, take a spin past newsmap, a news visualization program. It’s designed to take advantage of the space-dividing treemap algorithm made popular by SmartMoney’s Map of the Market. The big idea is that the amount of ink a story is getting in the national press is reflected by the amount of area dedicated to that story in newsmap interface. It’s a nice idea because we are in desperate need of landscape views of our shared information space.

Huge amounts of information won’t wreck our brains or make us babble incoherently. It’s just that we’ll be inefficient and stressed-out until we solve this problem of taking it all in. What we need is some altitude.