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March 27, 1999
Welcome to TNL.net. If you like this content, you may consider subscribing to the RSS feed.I’ve always felt that there was a need for a new interface paradigm to pop up on the web. With the increasing amount of information we are faced with every single day, the WIMP interface seems to be breaking down. Many companies have tried to address the problem. Some of you may remember my column raving about Natricial about 2 years ago and a few of you may have tried Enfish Tracker Pro but, from my point of view, those still fell short of properly organizing REALLY LARGE amounts of data.
Enters Cartia, a Bellevue (WA) company founded in 1996 to create visual landscapes based on online content. While they are primarily a software development house, they have put together an impressive set of demos on the News Maps site.
By now you’re probably wondering where all this is leading. Well, to put it quite simply, NewsMaps puts us one step closer to the cyberspace William Gibson had dreamed up.
The concept: you get a topographical map (similar to those hard to fold AAA maps everyone has used once or twice in their lives) of the latest news. Each subject is getting its own spot on the map and the higher the mountain, the more information there is related to it.
For example, in the USA news map, Kosovo looked to be the highest mountain. But the comparison to regular maps does not stop there: The map actually groups related subjects so from Kosovo, you can go to UN and refugees and from there move on to the next subject. Clicking on a point of the map will bring up headlines, rolling your mouse over a headline will bring up a summary and clicking on that headline will bring up the actual story.
For people not comfortable with the map metaphor, a text-driven menu ranking the topic by numbers of mentions in the press is also available. A basic search engine allows you for quicker perusing of the same content, and a flag features allows you to flag certain stories for further perusal at a later time or for sharing purpose. That features allows you to create a page with summaries of the flagged stories.
The system runs in Java and is a good start. A faster engine and easier move across the maps are among things that would be nice additions.
