NewsZingo: Google News In Clouds

It all started with this little January 5, 2006 post based on the concept of tree maps. Since then, Newzingo has become a popular—and useful—online destination.

Thursday, January 05, 2006 – Newzingo!

Newzingo – Automatically tagging Google news and displaying the tag cloud proved to create a real-time news map of world events. The map (or cloud as geeks like to call it), changes constantly as the never ending flow of world events are transformed into news items, and captured visually by Newzingo.

In short, Newzingo presents information in a “cloud” format—a simple view of important keywords that makes it easy to visually identify what’s hot and what’s not (the subjects that are most frequently being written about at the time of your request). The more popular a search term, the larger the typography and brighter the colors used to represent them.

The cloud depicted here was captured just after Apple Computer’s CEO, Steve Jobs, addressed the MacWorld 2006 conference and announced the arrival of the first Macintosh computer to be built using the same Intel chips used in Windows-based PCs. You can tell by looking that the big news of the day involved Apple, Intel, iTunes, iPods, Macs, and Microsoft. Talk about handy!

Using clouds is easy. Visit Newzingo or its sister site, TechZingo. When the cloud loads, click on a specific word or phrase to focus your search.

Some organizations are combining cloud-style navigation options with keyword search to help users find relevant information quickly. TopicCloud, for instance, provides Blogsite.com users with a searchable cloud interface to the topics contained on its corporate website.

Related concept: folksonomy.

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