Tracking the News-Flow

Further to a previous post on this new idea of mapping news, there is a website called buzztracker.org which not only displays visually the news on a map but also shows frequencies, links between various stories and their effect on other locations.

This website shows a map of the world and a concentration of news stories is signified with a red dot. The higher the concentration, the bigger the red dot becomes. This is similar in many ways to the program previously discussed, Metacarta, but what buzztracker does is trace lines between the dots, signifying the associations between different places. The darker the lines, the stronger the link.

It is not clear however, how these stories are selected. It appears to be an aggregation of stories from online sources and is obviously predominantly a western service as Basra appears on the map as one of the most newsworthy areas with strong connections to London and Washington. As with Metacarta, there seems to be a lack of news and it seems possible that this phenomenon of mapping the news is yet to take off as fully as it might.