The internet is vast and the volume of information available to us is simply staggering.  In the face of ever-growing resources for news on virtually any topic, how can we effectively filter this to find the news that is of interest to us? The key to surviving the information overload that is the internet is the use of clever tools designed to customize our searches or set parameters for what we are interested in.

One such tool  is called Newsmap, which was designed by Marcos Weskamp. It creates a visualization of information from  the Google News news aggregator.  Google’s  aggregator collects news from around the world. Newsmap takes the aggregated news stories and turns them into this:

Wow. I know what you are thinking: “Too much!” And it may be. But let me walk you through this and then show you how we can customize it to collect just the information we want.

The different colours correspond to the different news categories listed across the bottom right.  Hover your mouse over any of the stories (on the website of course, not here) and a snippet from the story will pop up. Click your mouse on the story and it will open up in another window, at the website from which the story came.  The creator explains the size of the cells:

“Google News automatically groups news stories with similar content and places them based on algorithmic results into clusters. In Newsmap, the size of each cell is determined by the amount of related articles that exist inside each news cluster that the Google News Aggregator presents. In that way users can quickly identify which news stories have been given the most coverage, viewing the map by region, topic or time. Through that process it still accentuates the importance of a given article.”

The above image is all the news from Canada in all news categories.

Now let’s make this  find just news from Canada about seniors, in the category of ‘health.  We keep ‘Canada’ selected at the top, type in ‘seniors’ in the search bar on the top right, and de-select all the categories at the bottom except for health. ‘ What we get looks like this:

This is a very handy tool for a group like us who run a blog that needs fresh content updated every day or two, but it’s also fun for anyone who would like to try it.  We can customize the search to look for a variety of topicssee quickly what topics are hottest in the news right now.

To try this yourself, head over to Newsmap and give it a whirl. Remember, you can’t break it, so just enter something in the search bar and see what happens.  Happy hunting!