Newsmap Concept

NewsKnowledge and The Hive Group have joined forces to bring you News Maps, visual maps of the NewsIsFree headline database. News Maps allow you to quickly scan dozens of news articles and instantly understand what's being reported all over the world.

Each square in the News Map is an article. You can obtain additional detail on each article by moving your mouse over it. You can read an article by clicking on it.

The Hive Group's Honeycomb algorithm organizes news headlines by source. Size and Color information indicate article age and popularity (described below). You can easily filter and rearrange you results to view articles that meet certain criteria, or that contain certain text.

We hope you enjoy our News Maps and encourage you to explore these new tools. We hope that News Maps will allow you to access news more quickly and comprehensively than you ever thought possible.

Popularity Newsrank Concept

To make the Newsmap useful we introduced a newsrank algorithm. This algorithm takes into account a variety of anonymous data we collect. Among these are

• Ranking of clicks on stories from this news source
• Ranking of subscriptions to this news source
• How popular is a news headlines (Ranking of it's clicks against a click band)
• How many Weblogs refer to this headline

Your clicks on specific news stories in the Newsmap - but also the clicks on our freely available RSS feeds get into the counting. The algorithm above is subject to change over time and ideas are welcome. One of the effects is that stories from a major news source (e.g. CNN) start with a higher popularity ranking than a story from an unknown Weblog.