What’s Mappening

For all the political wonks who read better pictorially then verbally, the Newsmap is long overdue. Basically, it takes the Google News aggregator and creates a graphical version of it, allocating cell spaces to particular news items based on how often the same story occurs across multiple news sites at a particular point in time. Designed and conceived by Marcos Weskamp, the Newsmap can map news by countries and/or categories, based on your specification.

As of this afternoon, John Kerry’s “This Is My Life” ad campaign is getting good play, as is California’s move to dump Diebold. The biggest story, however, involves the White House’s latest Iraqi damage control effort, involving the incredibly outrageous and incredibly damaging torture of Iraqi detainees.

From time to time, I’ll be posting different maps–especially if something big happens to be breaking.