4 More Amazing Graphical Ways To Browse & Read News
Data visualization starts with the idea of giving you a graphical tool to wrap all that information around your head. In the case of news, it ends with a really cool and interesting way to see news a bit differently.
Some of the data visualization based apps that focus on news may be experimental. It’s difficult to say whether graphical news apps will take off or not; but for now they remain as offbeat ways to browse and read news.
DoodleBuzz
It’s called a typographic news explorer. The interesting graphical news app is meant to break you out of the usual way you browse for news – from the top down. This one fosters creativity. It all starts with a doodle. You get a blank canvas and a search box. Search for a news item and then just doodle around to get all interlinked stories. As you doodle on, the news items branch out and you can go on a wild, chaotic journey through all the information that’s out there. Doodling also gets you the original source of the news. It’s difficult to explain this app in words – try it out.
tenbyten
To describe the site in their own words – Every hour, 10×10 collects the 100 words and pictures that matter most on a global scale, and presents them as a single image, taken to encapsulate that moment in time.
If that went over your head, just launch the app and play around with the little thumbnails. At the backend, the app has scanned the RSS feeds of several leading international news sources (ABC, BBC, Reuters etc.) and culled the most important keywords using a special algorithm. The top 100 words are chosen along with their images. This human history goes into the 10×10 grid. You can check it by the hour and also go back into history with the cool timeline.
Oursignal
We have featured this cool graphical news app before in our directory of news apps. It’s like a news aggregator with a difference – a visual one. Just like any other news aggregator, it plucks the most popular news stories from Digg, Reddit, Delicious, Yahoo! Buzz and Hacker News and displays them in one place. The more popular the story the bigger it appears on the homepage. Clicking on the square takes you to the source. You can also preview it in the bottom frame. With a registration and log-in, you can set about customizing the ways news squares will be displayed like choosing a theme and entering your own choice of feeds. The results are not always perfect but you can try it out. It’s also quite similar to NewsMap which is a Google News aggregator.
Newser
Newser makes news reading more fun by taking news stories from around the world and showing them as thumbnails on a grid. Clicking on them takes you to the news stories. This is not really offbeat, but nonetheless a visual departure from the normal way of scanning headlines. We had taken a previous look at Newser when we mentioned 5 Great Multi-Source News Websites.
These five web apps are interesting visualizations. They may not allow you to read ‘between the lines’ but they serve to break you away from the commonplace. If you are looking at more interesting ways to digest news, check out the articles below:
- 3 Fun & Useful Google News Mashups
- 7 Free Online News Games That Are Based On World Affairs & News Events
- Catch The News On A World Map With These 7 Map-Based News Aggregators
- 10 News Photo Galleries To Catch All The Latest World News In Pictures
- 6 Chrome Extensions For Catching The Latest News Headlines
- 5 Alternatives To The New York Times That Are Still Free
Source: http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/4-amazing-graphical-ways-browse-read-news/
Image Credit: Shutterstock
