Looking at the News

from the site:

Buzztracker is software that visualizes frequencies and relationships between locations in the Google world news directory.

Buzztracker tries to show you how interconnected the world is: big events in one area ripple to other areas across the globe. Connections between cities thousands of miles apart become apparent at a glance.

An RSS feed – which include images, of course, or else it'd be no different from other news feeds – is also available. Aside from the imaging, though, it's a good way to rank news stories and see how much weight different news organizations give different news (or non-news). It is also a pretty clear indicator of which newspapers simply recycle the exact same AP stories, rather than relying on their own critical investigation. For example, here's today's Baghdad report.

A number of good points are brought up in this Metafilter post regarding Buzztracker, as well as a suggestion for weighting articles to eliminate the inherent bias suggested by so many American, British and Canadian news sources. Another news visualization tool, Newsmap, is also mentioned.