Buzztracker - world news mapped on barganews

The eagle eyed amongst you will by now have noticed a new addition to barganews - that small white map with red spots down near the bottom on the right hand side.

So what is that all about then ?

Well, its called the buzztracker and it is software that visualizes frequencies and relationships between locations in the Google world news directory. Buzztracker tries to show you how interconnected the world is: big events in one area ripple to other areas across the globe. Connections between cities thousands of miles apart become apparent at a glance



On the daily index page, you should see a list of cities with percentages next to them. The number represents the percentage of news stories that city is associated with for that day.

Locations that appear more often are represented by red circles on the map. The more frequently the cities appear, the larger the circle. Connections between locations are determined by intercontextual referencing in news articles. These connections are represented by lines between locations. The stronger the connection, the darker the line.

Move the mouse over the map to read the location names. Click on a city and relevant news stories will appear. Click "+ Enlarge" to get a larger version of the world map.

The top 20 locations for the day are listed on the far left. The currently selected location is highlighted.

The middle column -- "Associated Locations" -- lists locations appearing in the same articles as the selected location. The percentages represent the strength of association with the selected location in the left-hand column.

The right column -- "Associated Articles" -- lists all articles associated with the selected location in the left-hand column. The number to the left in parentheses is the number of times the location appears in the article. The articles are sorted by frequency.

It has only been running for a week on barganews but already people are getting used to seeing very quickly on the map where the major news stories are coming from around the world and with just one click they can find and read those articles.