Where Is The ´óÏó´«Ã½ News?
[Made by ´óÏó´«Ã½ Staff]
This rather crude prototype splices the RSS feed of the ´óÏó´«Ã½ News World Edition Index page with World 66’s "Visited Countries" map to produce a real-time picture of which countries are in the ´óÏó´«Ã½â€™s news headlines.
The script parses the ´óÏó´«Ã½â€™s RSS feed, then pattern matches across the headline and description of a story in the feed to look for the names of countries. It then constructs the query string to generate a World 66 Visited Countries map, and pulls that into a frameset so that it can be displayed alongside a list of the headlines from the feed. The headlines link back to ´óÏó´«Ã½ News and open the correct story in a new window.
The perl script can be downloaded and the programming mocked at
In an ideal world the map would be a nice flash-based interface, and would have the headlines of the relevant stories as tool tips if you hovered over them. Instead of simply being green or red it would be nice to have shading so that countries that had more stories written about them would appear darker.
What I would really like to do is make countries with no news about them disappear off the map completely, so that you saw a different outline of the world’s land masses depending on the current news agenda.
(Oh, and someone would solve the problem of semantically understanding that "US Troops Shoot Italian Hostage In Iraq" isn’t set in three different countries. And it would recognize that a news headline about Paris means it is in France)
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