Candy-Colored News

Marumushi's Newsmap is a visual stunner that seems, on first look, like the answer for any over-worked, time- and attention-deficient person headed out to a cocktail party: stories from Google's News Aggregator, laid out in blocks of color, treemap fashion, with boxes or bands varying in both size and shade as the story itself waxes and wanes. An easy wrap on the world in just moments.


But while it's great as a quick tool, the Newsmap's real brilliance is where and how it digs deeper, functioning with more user options than many news websites. You can select news headlines from as many as 11 different countries, across 7 different categories, and you can go back into a week of archives in 6 hour chunks. For more detail on any one story, clicking on the box links you to the live story. Users begin to easily spot the relationships between stories, their emergence and importance around the world or their nonexistence in other places, turning all readers into modern anthropologists.

Once again, one of those things that seems so easy and obvious, you wonder why it took so long...