1. What if it were more of a “heat map” whereby highly ranked/commented/voted-on stories were visually distinct from the rest? Then you could glance at the world, your country, or your state and find out quickly “where the action is”. A bomb went off in some corner of the world you don’t pay attention to? The cluster of stories around that area would ideally be called out for you to see and visually differentiated from the rest of the run-of-the-mill news.

2. What if you lived in a small neighborhood of a big city and you wanted to see, say, all of the breaking real-estate news in areas which you may be considering moving to?

Information can always be had in different ways, and maps usually *aren’t* the best way… but given enough filtration and display options, you can present something pretty interesting. The best example of this is Adrian Holovaty’s chicagocrime.org site. Want to see all of the mugging crimes committed on your block recently? Zoom in and filter. And then consider getting the hell out of Chicago… :)

Here’s the thing with visualizations though. Would people use it? I’ve thought about this for TailRank. I’d totally expose the data and allow someone else to do it themselves but I’m not really sure it’s a real world and useful app fro everyday people.

I mean if you want stories on SF you could just view the ‘sanfrancisco’ tag right?

Kevin

Lazy Sunday, the source of the quote.

I still love how the US stories all point to somewhere in West Virginia… very volatile place, it would seem.

We just announced tagging in our system – makes perfect sense to me (tagging allows us to make show insertion and consumption easier over time).
I’m really excited about a byproduct of the tagging: if venue X has 100 shows in our system, with tags we can look back to see a lot of information about those shows – genre most importantly. Match (mash?) that up with other data, like our zipcode/population/ album sales / mp3 sales (having partner companies == good), and we then have valuable market data we can share w/ bands looking for interesting places to play.

Further (can you tell I’m really excited?), by allowing tagging and different information to float back out of our system, we’ll be making the insertion process easier – once a few people tag a band/artist, we’ll have a good idea of what type of music they are – and can keep live updates (by majority) on where to put those bands on display.

Interesting times, indeed.

I’d appreciate some tips at dinescumiky (at) hotmail.com

While I would agree with you that there’s a lot of eye candy (how many gradients can we get?), I’d have to disagree that there’s no attention to how people will use the Web.

I think that’s the difference with the Web development nowadays: Those of us that have been through the first few rounds of ups-and-downs, we have finally emerged to an age where owners, managers, partners, and clients now hear our chants of “but will they use it? CAN they use it?”

Sure, I think there’s a bit much of the 2.0. discussion going on, but there was too much blogging going on too … livejournal and more… long before there was a name for it.

Finally, if we don’t build it, how will we ever learn what will be used? Shouldn’t usability be determined by people attempting use?