One of the biggest problems with the Blog world is that it is hard to figure out what’s the buzz in the blog world. Sure you can check out some of the “hot links” pages on PopDex, BlogDex, and Technorati, but still scorlling through pages of links is a bit tedious. I have found a new service, NewsIsFree’s NewsMap which can quickly tell me what’s the hottest story of the day. Today it happens to be the IPO Screw-Up at Google. You can quickly scan the hottest story from a source, say New York Times. I am not sure if anyone of you remember the market watch map created by Smart Money. This is much like that, expect less attractive.

NewsKnowledge and The Hive Group have created this really cool app, and you can instantly understand what’s being reported all over the world. Each square in the News Map is an article. You can obtain additional detail on each article by moving
your mouse over it. You can read an article by clicking on it. The Hive Group’s Honeycomb algorithm organizes news headlines by source. Size and Color information indicate article age and popularity. You can easily filter and rearrange you results to view articles that meet certain criteria, or that contain certain text. You can sign-up for the beta and create your own sources so now you can blog/scan your favorite sources. No longer limit yourself to 200 blogs. Go for a 1000 🙂 So why am I linking to this app? Well for two reasons – I think the visual representation of data is the wave of the future. If you live the broadband life, you are assaulted by torrential flow of data, and you need a way to quickly skim through it and make sense. I think this is an approach a lot of other sources will also take.