Jul 28 2008
The Best Visually Engaging News Sites
This is a one-of-a-kind “The Best…” list.
I don’t think any of the sites on this list are very accessible to English Language Learners. Those sites can be found at The Best News/Current Events Websites For English Language Learners.
This list is just a collection of links I’ve been accumulating for applications that visually represent current news in particularly unusual ways. I certainly wouldn’t get my news from them, but I thought readers might find them intriguing to glance through. I do admire the creativity of their designers, though.
It’s pretty difficult for me to describe them, so I’ll just list them here and let you discover how they work on your own.
Here are my choices for The Best Visually Engaging News Sites:
* News Map
* Newsline
* Newser, This site shows a large grid of news photos, along with a headline, short description, its source, and how long ago it has been published. If you move your cursor to the “more” section of each photo, you get a longer summary.
The Breaking News Map automatically moves through a map of the world to…breaking news spots and gives you a short summary of the story and a link where you can get more. You can set the speed of the movement to your preference, and you can also pick the subjects the stories will cover.
Track This Now lets you submit a search query (for example, I wrote in “Veterans Day”). Then, on a map of the world, a bunch of “push-pins” appeared showing the origination point of current news stories related to that subject. I clicked on one of the markers, and the beginning of that particular story showed with a link to the original source.
GNews Vision is the latest addition to this list. A pointer (in the shape of a plane) moves to the region of the world you choose and, in the language you pick, shares headlines and very short summaries of recent news stories. If you choose “World” it will move around the map highlighting a variety of stories at the speed you choose.
Time Space: World is from the Washington Post. It shows a world map, along with multiple “push-pins” in areas where news events are occurring. Clicking on them will bring you videos and images from that location. It’s pretty engaging, but, at least the times I’ve tried using it, the application loads quite slowly.
Earth Knowledge lets you click on headlines related to environmental news, and then leads you to a summary of the story and a Google Map pinpointing its location on the globe.
I’m placing MetaKiller (not the best name) on this list — tentatively. It appears to be brand new, and it’s not quite clear to me if it works or how it works. It has a very engaging and accessible design of multi-colored blocks that show a headline, a summary of the story, and a link to the whole piece. I especially like their summaries — most of the other similar sites only show the first couple of lines and not an actual summary.
The site says by clicking on the “X” in the corners of the stories if you don’t want to read them, that it “learns” what stories you’re interested in and can recommend better ones. If it indeed does that, it will only work on the same computer since there is no way to register or sign-in. One potential nice option is that readers can add other stories, and summaries they write, to the mix of articles that are shown on the site. It’s unclear, though, how it’s determined which reader submissions are included.
All-in-all, I think the site really has some potential for being useful to English Language Learners and others. I just hope they refine it further.
Google has just announced a new feature called Google News Timeline. It shows you the news in the form of a ….timeline, with images and the first sentence or two of the story.
Newstin is the newest addition to this list. Click on “Click to open Newstin Map — Visual Navigation” and you’ll get an eye-opening interactive table of contents.
jQueery is a sort of strange, but engaging, too to scan the news.
The BBC has developed what they call a “prototype” of a News Globe. It’s similar to some other sites on this list– it has a virtual globe globe that you spin, and there are points on it. When you place your cursor on the points a short introduction to a news story based on that location shows-up, and you can click on it to go to the complete report.
Ophan is the newest addition here. It shows a slow-moving and multi-colored moving “stream” of news items (the headlines and the beginning of the story) which you can click on to go to the primary source. If you register and sign-in it provides a personalization feature which helps the application “learn” what kinds of stories you’re interested in. Soon, it will also have a similar streaming feature for queries you type in a search box.
Google Fast Flip is a neat new way to read news online. You can read how Google explains it here.
News Dots is from Slate Magazine.
Feel free to offer additional suggestions.
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[...] The Best Visually Engaging News Sites by Larry Ferlazzo A list with applications that visually represent current news in particularly [...]
http://www.kartoo.com is another search site, offering a new way of visualizing the search results. At the top-right of the screen, activate the “bubble-mapping- icon” (for lack of better words)
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