There are maps, and there is news, but until recently there has not been much integration between them. If ever there was a potential audience for news-mapping solutions, those charged with managing a globally allocated basket of assets would seem to be it. So for this post, we set out to determine (i) how useful news-mapping solutions are for finding and keeping abreast of news, and (ii) whether any of the free solutions is yet up to the task.

Our conclusion: If you have a global or regional coverage mandate, organizing headlines or story content geographically has its appeal, though that appeal is still more novel than functional — at least in terms of the solutions we have come across.

This Just In: Our Geosurvey

A site such as Multi News Map, described below, probably comes closest to combining geographical visualization and news delivery. It organizes content by region and displays a good number of headlines at a dose, without a lot of clicking about. That type of interface is the way to go — but would benefit in Multi News Map’s case from a broader, global view, flagging top stories in a separate pane. Also, the user should be able to include or filter out whatever kinds of content she chooses (e.g., by category).

All of the sites reviewed below are free.

The WorldNews Interactive Map offers links to country-specific news sources that you select from a map of the world. It has one of the cleanest interfaces, but you can’t scan headlines country-by-country — you must drill down first to specific locales and then to individual sources.

Muti News Map presents regional maps, and produces a set of headlines for any country or region you select. Unlike the WorldNews map, you never navigate away from the map pane, so navigating among countries is easier.

Mibazaar World News plots recent New York Times articles on a world map, all right, but there is no categorization by topic (such as business or politics). You can link from the headlines directly to the stories.

Maplandia News Centre has potential: It is trying to provide functionality not seen in other news mappers, like allowing users to link to countries from article headlines (instead of forcing you to drill down from the country level), and providing visual cues to support regional navigation. But for now, there’s just not enough news here. The site aggregates only a few headlines per region and doesn’t use page space well. But it looks like good work in progress and we will check back.

The Global Incident Map delivers the the world’s worst news to your browser. It focuses on terrorist events. Flickering icons depict the locations of bomb blasts and scares, parliamentary or office evacuations, white-powder-in-the-mail, etc., over time periods of your choosing. A scroller includes current headlines; the site unwisely promises a “USA School Incidents Map — coming soon.” (We hope they think better of it.)

Josephine

Of course, it’s not GlobalIncidentMap.com’s fault that the world has so much geo-locatable bad news. But fair warning: Use of that site may take some of the fun out of watching old La Femme Nikita episodes for free at AOL Video.
Section One The show was canceled years ago (no surer testament to its quality), and if you’re not already a fan, we suggest starting with the first season’s first episode and proceeding, with increasing pleasure, through the next 95. Then decide if TV ever integrated a writer’s intentions with what got shot, when those intentions were more subtle than, say, an overweight macaque on fire. Very neat.

We saw Peta Wilson once, chatting outside of a community theater in the East Village. It has been all downhill for us since then, friends, all downhill.

As for non-fiction: see the CBCNews World in Conflict map for a big-picture view of persistent global conflicts.

MediaScrape organizes video clips by region and country. If you register for free, you can choose to filter out certain types of news clips, though the customization is not specific enough (one of the eight news categories is “Business & Tech”).

There are many other map-based world news aggregators. The purpose of this entry is not to index, but to recommend. Do you know a site that we overlooked, but shouldn’t have? Send us an e-mail or post a comment. We’ll happily amend.

World News without the Map

Useful sources of news organized by region or country, but that don’t rely on a mapping metaphor, include:

• Washington Post World News
• New York Times International News
• BBC News International
• International Herald Tribune
• CNN World Business News
• World News Network
• World-Newspapers.com
• Internet Public Library: Newspapers Collection
• OnlineNewspapers.com

A Hybrid Site

Silbreaker, one of our favorite global news-aggregators, also contains some unique mapping capabilities, though that is not its specialty. (See our article on it here; this paragraph was added 16 June 2008.)

Postridie orbis

All of this mapping got us to thinking about the geolocations of our own visitors. Any site-analytics solution worth its salt makes easy work of such tracking; but it seems particularly appropriate to a site that, like Stracia, targets global fill-in-the-blank (investors; news hounds; nomads).

To date, we have been visited by readers from every (populated) continent; eleven subcontinental regions; 107 cities in 21 countries. Tomorrow, the world. ♦