Slashgeo

The Google Earth Blog informs us of CBS offering their News in Google Earth in a convenient manner. From the blog: "They put a lot of stories in the same city (Washington, DC, NYC). Now when you click on placemarks on the same city they spread out into a star pattern allowing you to see all the stories from that location. By the way, the news stories are usually accompanied by nice relevant photos and a link to more details. Often video accompanies the stories once you go to their web page. Very professional multimedia content."

The Memory Link offers a short entry on the localization of journalism and the ties with geospatial technologies. It links to this Frontline article about hypoerlocalization of newspaper: "The second thing that's happened at the Tribune and at the L.A. Times in particular is that newspapers around the country have figured out that what you have to do today to survive is provide local news coverage. People want to read about what's going on in their own communities, and the Web usually can't provide that. The Web can tell you what's going on in Iraq; the Web can tell you what's going on in Washington, D.C. It can't tell you what's going on in Des Moines if you live in Des Moines." This article seems to completely miss the point about the geo-enablement of the web. See related stories.

Here's an interesting map mashup using Yahoo!Pipes linked to on AnyGeo Blog. From the write up: "The app grabs news from google news (yes indeed, GISuser.com news gets crawled by this news crawler - a great benefit of getting your news listed here) and displays on the map where you can then scroll through the results, view a synopsis and click-through for a full read if the caption looks interesting."

This reminded me of another news application called newsmap that aggregates google news, visualizing stories in boxes proportional to the amount of coverage they are receiving using a treemap algorithm. Very cool. Now if someone could only combine both concepts: amount of story coverage and georeferencing to a news app...

Map Hawk links to the abstract of a newly available study on GIS in journalism. From the abstract: "The indepth-interviews revealed factors that will influence the diffusion of GIS, including the availability of map data, competition between media agencies, the ease of getting management to buy GIS once its functionality has been demonstrated to them, and the general use of secondary GIS products. The Web survey showed that 63% of the reporters were aware of GIS but only 11% of the reporters surveyed currently use GIS." You must pay to go beyond the abstract.

Vector One offers an article named Can Newspaper Business Models Succeed with Spatial Information Technologies? From the entry: "Spatial technologies can provide a unique opportunity to engage readership in newspapers. Whereas most articles are searchable inhouse by author, title and topic, spatial information technologies further support these options through locating place and temporally, though time. This has important and critical opportunities for authoritative news sources because suddenly the ability to write, based on time and place, can be used to enrich and constructively engage readership into context more effectively." See also related stories below.