MetaNews from MetaCarta: New Map Maps the News

This is pretty cool:



It's a joint project from moreover and MetaCarta that lets you search for news by geography. Says moreover of the map:

Scroll to the right location and the sad tragedy of the Air France crash is shown, south of the Cape Verde Islands. For brighter news, try a search for “new species” and see where they’re being discovered, and a personal favourite: check out Antarctica for news about hanging gardens long since lost in ice. (Leads to, what is the most geographically isolated news story out there?)

As someone who is pretty lousy at remembering names, but has an uncanny ability to remember where people are from, let me just say: information that is organized by geography - and a fortiori, that is presented on a map - is the bomb. (And yes, alas, my slang vocabulary is and forever will be trapped in the '90s.)

This map is kind of like this, only more comprehensive. And it's kind of like this, but it indexes by location of the news story, rather than of the newspaper. And it's the only mappy sort of thing I've seen that lets you search for news by location. For instance, if I want to know about what's going on in Kyrgyzstan - and I often do! - I can pull up a map with news stories from around that country, along with dozens of headlines just from the last 24 hours. (It's not perfect, though; one result for Kyrgyzstan was this story from Nogales, Arizona, about a Little League baseball team called 'Big Chuy.' Chuy is also an oblast in Kyrgyzstan.)

Via Resource Shelf.