I’m pretty impressed that NewsMap
came back to life so quickly after the HTML parser at which powered the site was cut of by Google.
Marcos, who developed the news visualization, managed to work directly with the Google News team to resolve the issue after hundreds or thousands of fans shared their disappointment in comments on his (Google-powered Blogger) blog.
I’m really happy to see it back up and running; it’s been an important part of the (necessary) growing interest in information design online. What’s always impressed me is how well executed it is, and that’ it’s more than 5 years old.
I can clearly remember the first time I saw NewsMap. I was in my freshman year of college, sitting in a teeny-tiny bedroom in a four-bedroom apartment I shared with a bandmate and my current business partner. We had a cabled network, because 802.11b was too slow for our needs. I remember, for months, NewsMap was my homepage, as I greatly preferred it to looking at Google News. I also remember how embarrassed I was that “Entertainment” was one of my preferred categories.
It was immediately striking to me how similar the appearance of NewsMap was to Milton Glaser’s studies of editorial news design that appear in his book Art Is Work.
I never brought this to the attention of Milton Glaser while I was a mentor in his studio, but doing so often crossed my mind. Maybe someday…
