Tag clouds in the Newsroom
by Cem Basman
Tag clouds are everywhere in these days. They look cool. Hip. And very web 2.0. Now, Newzingo is a brand new cloud in the sky. It is constantly watching Google News for new stories, extracts related "tags" and displays them in a cloud. It's fast. It adopts even the supercool Fisher Price look ("BIG is beautiful"). But somehow it looks cluttered to me. The logo is a bit cheap too. But it works.
Compare Newzingo to the award winning Newsmap from 2004 which still appeals much more to me. Even if it has not incorporated tags which it couldn't have known at that time of course:
Newsmap is an application that visually reflects the constantly changing landscape of the Google News news aggregator. A treemap visualization algorithm helps display the enormous amount of information gathered by the aggregator.
With Newsmap you can toggle your views between different countries, categories, layouts, and freshness. Very neat. But slower ... Decide which one of these two aggregators works best for you. Different concepts. Different solutions.
Comments
I created a similar prototype last year at http://yahoo.theherrens.com using Yahoo news feeds.
My TagCloud project at http://www.tagcloud.com lets anyone easily create tag clouds from any number of RSS feeds.
John, "tagcloud" is a wonderful invention. I like it. I was just not convinced how Newzingo deals with tags. News are a very complex topic. As a user you need to have the possibility to filter and change views.
