Newsmap: A Cool Way To View Google News

There are other ways to stay on top of trending topics besides Twitter. This clever, free application lets you see which news stories are getting the most attention worldwide.

FREE & USEFUL | Top 10 Trending Topics is a feature on the Twitter website that lists in order of importance whatever subject matter—from hard news to twaddle—is most on the minds of tweeters at any given nanosecond in the Twitterverse.

Newsmap is an application that tracks trending topics, too. It employs a hierarchy of colour blocks to highlight the currently hottest stories on the websites of legitimate news outlets in 15 countries. This free service is news you can view, and although it isn’t interactive the way Twitter’s Trending Topics is, it can be addictive if you’re any kind of a news junkie at all.

So How Does Newsmap Work?

The Newsmap application “scrapes” (Internetspeak for data harvesting from websites) the Google News aggregator for what it needs to create an attractive, continuously changing (it’s updated every 10 minutes) one-screen picture of top Google News stories worldwide. It’s not meant to replace Google News but to present Google News headlines (each one with a link to a story) in a visually organized way across Newsmap’s seven colour-coded categories: world and national affairs, business, technology, sports, entertainment and health.

Comparing the Newsmap pages of several countries—Canada, the U.S., the U.K. and New Zealand, for example—will reveal both the differences and similarities between what is considered the most important news in these places and how much play individual stories receive within particular news categories. An easy read, Newsmap is a fun way to stay on top of Google News. —Ruth Rainey

To check out Newsmap visit www.newsmap.jp

Photo: Newsmap