Information Visualization: newsmap

I’ve recently discovered the Newsmap application from Marcos Weskamp and Dan Albritton. It’s an awarded experiment in Information Visualization which displays a so called treemap of the stories aggregated by Google News. A treemap is a visual representation of data using rectangles sized and colored to graphically display the relative importance of each information.

Newsmap does an incredible job at displaying stories, letting you easily tell the category, popularity and time of publication for all the news displayed, using nothing more then color and size.

Weskamp was born in Argentina, studied Architecture in Japan and worked in Tokyo as a designer and interface developer. He is now working for Adobe in San Francisco. His latest works include a visualization of the social relationships inside Flickr and a curious installation in a Tokyo shop using a webcam to reveal the colors people are wearing.