News.com.au Maps

Although it appears to be 7 months old, I recently stumbled across a useful Google Maps mash-up from News.Com.Au. The ‘News Map’ places 10 articles (they say 10 on their site, but it appears to be a lot more than that) from news.com.au World and National sections on to the Google Map interface, allowing users to see where particular stories are taking place. In order to determine the geographical co-ordinates, Metacarta is used to extract place names from the articles and convert them in to longitudinal and latitudinal references.

Of course this isn’t the only mash-up of its kind, with others providing such Google Map displays with articles from the Associate Press, and news.bbc.co.uk. There are also alternative implementations, such as a map by multi.co.za, which allows uers to click on a country and be presented with a list of articles, from an array of aggregated news sources, which reference the  selected country.