If you’re looking for the future of news, a pretty good example of it is at UK startup silobreaker, which isn’t a farm demolition service but a pretty cool news aggregation and visualization site. In other words, it lets you look at news in different ways. And it’s caught the attention of Microsoft, who today announced it had select the company for its Startup Accelerator program.
The website itself looks pretty normal on first glance–news on the left, three columns of stuff. But look closer. Four boxes on the right offer different sorts of information: a trends chart showing “media attention” (presumably the number of mentions in the news) of different Windows products:
Another shows the relationships between Rio Tinto, other companies, topics and cities:
And my favorite, a map showing all the places where things are happening in the news. Move your mouse over them and details will pop up in a small box:
Drop down lists of topics along the top of the website allow you to select your area, and it’s a satisfying range to choose from. Open the terroism page, for example, and you get a bunch of stories on terrorism, as well a map of hotspots (already zoomed in on the Middle East and Central/South Asia), and a trend map showing how media interest in terrorism in Afghanistan has risen markedly in recent weeks against that of Iraq and the U.S. Who knows how accurate this stuff is, and where it comes from, but it’s still an interesting way to slice and dice the data:
Not everything works quite as it’s supposed to but there’s still lots of quality in here, and it puts pretty much every other news site to shame. And it’s not even as if these elements are particularly new; I’ve long sung the praises of newsmaps and mindmaps as a way for online newspapers to get with the program, and it’s frankly been disappointing that so few have tried these things out.