news
Are they married yet?
Overwhelmed by the amount of coverage in the worldwide media about the Royal wedding? If so, you may be interested in checking out a simpler source of news about Prince William and Kate Middleton:
are they married yet.com will tell you all you really need to know about the occasion.
Geo brings people to Drupal
I recently discovered the iCommunity.tv localised video news site (via High Earth Orbit) and was especially interested as it was being run on Drupal.
This was one of the first places out on the internet that I'd seen Drupal's KML module being put to good use, for example to be able to view in Google Earth all of the citizen journalist videos from YouTube that are tagged as being from the city you're interested in (e.g. Stuttgart video news and its associated KML feed of Stuttgart video news). Grass roots journalism is only useful to readers if the content is filtered to your needs, if it's in the area you want to know about and it's the type of news that you're looking for. The iCommunity.tv site does that by tagging videos by location (both coordinates and the name of the nearest city) and by topic (politics, community life, arts, etc.) and lets you filter by a combination of those*.
I heard back from Chris Haller of iCommunity.tv after posting a comment on his announcement of the site. He told me that he was previously a Mambo/Joomla user, attracted to Drupal both by its flexibility and by its geo-capabilities. It's great to see that happening, and someone told me exactly the same thing yesterday too. It's also great that organisations like the Open Source Geospatial Foundation are using Drupal as their platform of choice.
Its good to see Drupal becoming more and more of a GeoCMS and people taking the tools and finding ways to apply them in useful and practical ways.
* KML feeds for multiple tags do not currently work in the KML module, as I've just discovered
Mapping the news
Today I came across buzztracker, a website which maps the connections between different places based on news items which have been published that day. It's fascinating to see where the 'hotspots' are and how they change from day to day.
The site reminds me of a couple of others I've come across over recent years which also set out to map the news.
Global Attention Profiles were the first to spring to mind, where each country is coloured according to the percentage of news coverage it's had that day based on a number of different news organisations' feeds. The Google News Map does it slightly differently by adding headlines of stories mentioning specific countries to the countries themselves. It doesn't cover many headlines so it isn't particularly useful but it's an interesting stepping stone to something which in theory could be so much more advanced. The Today's Front Pages interactive map takes a different approach still, showing the front page of the day's newspapers as you move your mouse over the city it's published in. Newsmap on the other hand doesn't map the news geographically but does map it visually according to how popular stories are judged to be.
