Google News Cloud
A few weeks ago I bookmarked an interesting site that I found on digg.com. The Google News Cloud is best described by the authors:
NewsCloud is a site experiment that fetches news from Google News, tries to find tags related to each news and presents a tag cloud of the daily news.
During the news process, there's no human intervention. All tags are discovered automatically from Google News by text analysis.
When a user passes the mouse over a tag, related tags gets highlighted. That way, you can have a glance of what the news is about.
When a user clicks on a tag, the related news are presented on the right box. Clicking on them goes directly to the news source.
The pages are served statically, and are generated every 30 minutes.
Currently, NewsCloud works on news for U.S. and Brasil. More countries are coming soon!
It shows up as a keyword cloud like those found on flickr and technorati. Actually, tag clouds are everywhere now!
So, I hovered over “Navy”:
Related keywords were highlighted in red. As expected, you can instantly see that there was a tragic accident today and the headlines give more detail:
Navy
I don’t think I’d every “go” to this site on a regular basis. It would be nice if it were served up as a feed, perhaps on a daily basis. I could then see the news cloud every morning and scan for keywords and related entries directly in my aggregator (assuming the JavaScript was preserved in the feed).