Slate´s News Dots
26 febrero 2010 at 8:58 (eMarketing, mercadeo, redes sociales) (Chris Wilson, comunidad, facebook, News Dots, redes sociales, Slate.com, Slatest, social media, Thompson Reuters)
Last week Chris Wilson (The Slatest) wrote a piece on a very interesting tool called News Dots which connects news topics by degrees of separation and displays these connections as a social network, a giant social network. The subjects are displayed as dots which show up if there are two or more stories related to them, the more stories, the bigger the dot will be on a map.
News Dots acts then as a radar scanning for news and linking them together allowing the user to see what connections there are and to monitor in a very simple and easy to use interface, what is being said on a particular topic, person, place, group, company and its relations to other news.
The interface also allows a user to zoom in or out of a particular topic and its connections, to filter tags and dates and also to see the headlines related to the topics on the right hand column of the frame. Very useful and cool I might say.
But how does it work? Very simple, News Dots scans for content from major sources, posts them to Calais, the Thompson Reuters service that tags content, and then News Dots (on Slate) connects any tags that appears twice in a story. The tool then tallies these connections creating a community of sorts among the tags.
What´s interesting to me is that by using this tool, one can see how subjects that are highly connected will start to cluster together in the network and reveal connections to different topics, regions, cliques, etc. allowing us to identify not only how many times it shows up, but how it relates, influences and connects to the rest of the region or world. Useful if you are a communications professional, or have a sensitive business and need to see how things you say or do are connected and influence other news.
It is a work in progress and Slate is encouraging readers to participate and send in ideas, so go see it in action at: http://slatest.slate.com/features/news_dots/default.htm
