27 Oct A really cool news-aggregator treemap – updated

Marcos Weskamp, a design engineer and “self-taught technologist” who likes to play with data visualization, has created a treemap display of Google News.

Newsmap shows stories as blocks on a grid. The size of the block reflects a story’s rating in Google’s search algorithm. The color of a block reflects its broad subject matter (world, national,business, technology, sports, entertainment, health), selectable with tabs along the bottom. The country of origin can be selected from tabs along the top (like the “Can” tab highlighted in the example above). Rolling your cursor over a block produces pop-up text like the white box above.

Like Google News, Newsmap is highly customizable, so you can preselect the range of stories likely to interest you.

[Update:] The site may be getting a lot of hits. It has been a bit shaky today.