Sooo Folksonomic!

Marcos Weskamp, graphic designer and art director, has been very good at putting in practises all the teories on mashup, realising an applicative that got him a premium award in the category of Net Vision at the Ars Electronica.

Taking advantage from Google News aggregator, Weskamp created a visual map of news, bringing together graphic elements and some clever functionalities. Here is a powefull example of folksonomy at work: it is the popularity of the news to determine his visual ranking: Marumushi Newsmap organises the news into a sinoptic table, creating visual relactions between categories in a immediate and intuitive way.

“Newsmap is an application that visually reflects the constantly changing landscape of the Google News news aggregator. A treemap visualization algorithm helps display the enormous amount of information gathered by the aggregator. Treemaps are traditionally space-constrained visualizations of information. Newsmap’s objective takes that goal a step further and provides a tool to divide information into quickly recognizable bands which, when presented together, reveal underlying patterns in news reporting across cultures and within news segments in constant change around the globe.

Newsmap does not pretend to replace the googlenews aggregator. It’s objective is to simply demonstrate visually the relationships between data and the unseen patterns in news media. It is not thought to display an unbiased view of the news, on the contrary it is thought to ironically accentuate the bias of it.“

Marumushi Newsmap gives emphasys to the tag cloud concept, by bringing it to a higher level and adding some extra functionalities. Every category (sport, finance, chronicle) is represented by a color: the brighter is the color, the more recent are the news and each box has got different dimension: the greater is the box, the more popular is the news. And you can filter the news by source or country.

A good idea for all travel vendor that want to leverage the popularity of a destination in a new, engaging way.