Online Journalism News

Look to the skies to help visitors read news

Online editors should take inspiration from the skies above and post news stories in "clouds", according to one Brazilian developer working on a new way to navigate copy more visually.

NewsCloud borrows the "tag cloud" methodology from socially organised sites like del.icio.us and Flickr to display stories using tags, weighted in size according to the number of sources.

Using material from the Google News gateway, stories are interrogated for keywords, which appear in larger type depending on the number of news organisations covering the event.

The site, written by Fernando Serboncini, builds on previous efforts, including the The Observer blog's "folksonomic zeitgeist", to highlighted related keywords when a reader points at a link. While the project is currently just an experiment, Mr Serboncini aims to roll out a UK version soon.

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google | the observer | online editors | united kingdom | fernando serboncini |

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