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Ideas

News Activity Map

  • Phil McAllister

* Monitor news RSS feeds for location every 2 hours or so
* Track how many items have changed in that feed since the last check
* Take a map of the UK and draw hotspots on the map to indicate areas of news activity
* Create an animation every day/week/month/year to show news activity around the country

The intensity of the colour is intended to represent the 'activity' of that place, i.e. how many news stories changed or were filed in that period.

The radius of the hotspot could be used to indicate how 'important' that story is, with importance being defined by how many different news indices that story has appeared on in that time period (need some way of cross referencing stories). I.e. a local story that only appears on the local index would be a small radius, but a story that appears on the Wales, UK, Frontpage & World Indices would be huge.

Could use different colours to categorise the story if that data becomes available.

  • 15 Mar 2005 11:28 AM

Comments  Post a comment

  • 1.
  • On 15 Mar 2005 12:15 PM,
  • Murray said:

like the idea

when we built postcoder, we tried to index news articles into the nearest system (find articles near to your postcode).

as it stands, without having the location data tagged properly on the story, it's really hard. The other question is how you handle a story about an upgrade to the east coast train line.

Is it glasgow, london, everywhere in between or none of the above?

I realise this is just implementation detail, but figured I'd add it for reference.

ps. We still have an un-used (but built & live) component of Postcoder that can return stuff based on distance to things. It has a natty xml interface, so you can add any xml blob, a title an a postcode, then run searches based on the postcode (only)

Here's a mockup

http://home.liquidsand.co.uk/backstage/news-activity.jpg

At a most basic level, you could just monitor the "Where I Live" feeds and assign a locus for each feed and use that to plot the activity. This was what I imagined was 'doable' at present.

This way you wouldn't need to worry about where the story actually was (east-coast mainline example), only where the index it appears on should be centred.

  • 3.
  • On 12 May 2005 11:47 PM,
  • Olly Benson said:

Joining the debate v late...

The problem with this thou is that you assume the same news values are applied across the country. For example, Guernsey with a population of 60,000 has a news index which is supposed to have fresh content on each day, and Beds, Bucks and Herts, with a population of 2.25m people has one index. What's the betting that stories that make the grade in Guernsey wouldn't make the grade in Beds, Bucks and Herts?

Secondly, when does a story become local? "Man survives 50 days at sea" is not a local story until it becomes "Berkshire man survives 50 days at sea". But is it a Berkshire story?

You also then have to consider that editors make news judgements on stories - why did the Soham murders create far more news than the murder of Damilola Taylor?

Just some thoughts...


Olly.

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