On News Visualization, Part I

This week’s column in The Asian Wall Street Journal’s Personal Journal (and online at WSJ.com, subscription only) is about visualizing the news:

To me it’s slightly daft that most news Web sites stick to an online format that someone wandering in from the mid-seventeenth century would recognize. Newspapers haven’t changed an awful lot in layout since they first appeared. There’s good reason for this. But why has the Internet, with all its interactive links, clicking, visuals, sounds and promise of customizing to the individual’s needs, not thrown out the newspaper model – headline, pictures, text — in favor of something better?

Beyond the services mentioned in the text, readers might want to explore some other Web sites that visualize data in different ways:

• AmazType, which uses Amazon’s database to create word-collages of books, DVDs or CDs.
• FlickrLand, a ‘network analysis of the Flickr population, based on data collected on March 14th, 2005’.
• Some cartograms of the U.S. election.
• A map of the week’s news using more traditional tools.
• A wordmap of the day’s main words.
• A slightly similar ‘tag soup’ of Yahoo news.

Meanwhile, as mentioned in the column, there’s a great Web site called information aesthetics which lists a lot of these and similar projects. Anything I’ve missed, please do let me know; I do remember quite a few efforts a few years back, but none of them seem to be active, or offer a public version, anymore.