Okay, this is cool -- a single screen that shows an aggregation of Google news stories, with size representing the number of stories on a topic, color representing the category, and hue representing the stories' age.
The site is designed by a company called Maramushi, headed by Marcos Weskamp, who describes himself as a San Francisco-based Design Engineer "who has a deep interest in playing with and visualizing lots of data. He is a self-taught technologist who constantly investigates the fields of Interaction Design and Information Visualization." He has studied in Argentina and Japan, and now works for an unnamed startup.
Newsmap works like this, according to the website: "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's objective is to simply demonstrate visually the relationships between data and the unseen patterns in news media."
Users can specify which country's perspective on news they want -- more than a dozen countries are available -- and users can also choose not to receive certain types of news, such as sports or entertainment.
The site has about 15,000 registered users in November -- in fact, so many that its servers are being overloaded, resulting in some spot outages.
