news subject heat map

16 March 2006

a weighted tag cloud that uses a heat map approach to visually distinguish the most popular tags & news subjects. see also newzingo tagcloud & mood news.
[guardian.co.uk|via benhammersley.com]

aesthetic & news . comments (4)

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comments

While a nice concept, this implementation isn't really a heat map--it's just a table with a pretty background.

The "heat" of each cell has nothing to do with the popularity of each news subject. Each cell has a different color based on its position in the table, with no relation at all to the popularity. Which makes it useless if you want to distinguish between news focused around one or two subjects and news more evenly distributed among subjects.

The page uses JavaScript to fill in the table, however, so it wouldn't be that difficult to tweak the script into producing a real heat map.

As it stands, this is a good example of how to misuse color in a visualization.

Trevor Lohrbeer . 17 March 2006

Everything2 (http://everything2.com/index.pl?node_id=13522) has had a heat map for a while, although its colors also seem to be hard-coded. Not sure what metric it would measure anyway.

Grant Hutchins . 19 March 2006

um yeah... this kills both those:
http://www.marumushi.com/apps/newsmap/newsmap.cfm

patricia . 23 March 2006

hey do u have a way i can see the world 1 peice at a time?

zach . 7 February 2007

shop