Development Seed Blog
Newsquake: Yesterday's Caribbean Earthquake News Mapped
A Glimpse at how Geocoding Helps Identify Stories in Managing News
A Glimpse at how Geocoding Helps Identify Stories in Managing News
I first noticed the trend at 4:00 pm yesterday afternoon when I was testing Managing News - it looked like something was going on in the Caribbean. I jumped over to CNN to see what was happening and saw that a major earthquake hit the Caribbean yesterday two hours before.
This morning I went back to Managing News to check out the earthquake coverage and checked out the geocoded map that Jeff talked about yesterday. The Caribbean earthquake news really jumps out.
As you can see, the earthquake got a lot of coverage in the news. Just looking at this and zooming in on the hot spots on the map gives you a pretty good idea of what's happening quickly.
Earthquakes and other natural disasters are a geographically sensitive topic that will almost always generate results that you can map like this. But mapping news about other topics can also help you take in the news in a totally different and often useful way. For example, say you track HIV/AIDS coverage in the mainstream media. When a new story, report, or event occurs and has a geographical connection, the map will point this out to you fairly quickly. This can be especially helpful when coverage about a topic you're tracking is happening in more than one place. This lets you quickly scan the hot spots and makes it easier to decide what matters most and where to dedicate your actions.
Come to think of it, I'm surprised that Google doesn't offer the news this way themselves on Google News.
Comments
This is a cool picture of a
This is a cool picture of a google map mashup showing earthquake news being automatically geo tagged - Yesterday's earthquake in the Caribbean jumps out . It is cool to see geo tagging getting smart.
Something funky with the mapping pop-up
Hi guys --
Isaac Taylor here in NY. Friend of Tim Cullen's.
Just wanted to let you know that I'm seeing something funky with this mapping UI. When the pop-uppy layer loads I can see it just fine, but if I try to click on the map or the zooming controls then it barfs on me -- half the map disappears and the close/esc function doesn't work... need to scroll the dead map off the page or refresh.
I'm on a Mac in firefox and have a screenshot if you want to see it. Just shoot me an email.
- Isaac
Just a picture
Hey Isaac,
The reason the map doesn't zoom in is because it is just a screensot from the site we have it set up on. As for the JS errors I also just saw that the image popup leave a funny black sport unless you refresh the page. I will look into that :). Thanks for your feedback!
eric
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