[via IndusNeXus] Marcos Weskamp and Dan Albritton have launched a news visualisation tool that is supposed to prioritise news according to what's important for the reader. Although I don't really understand the criteria for doing this (relevance to the reader, extent of reporting in the general media, keywords...?), it seems like a good idea.
Newsmap takes news feeds from Google News and displays headlines in font sizes that vary according to the "importance" of the news item. It is a good parallel to real-world newspapers, which use large headlines for important news and small headlines for less important news. But it goes a step beyond the newspaper model because it can be customised to each reader.
This could be an especially useful service for people with very little time who don't have any specific news needs and only want to be generally aware of things going on. A mobile application suggests itself.
Link: Newsmap
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