News Dots

Slate recently introduced a fun little infographic feature. The News Dots service aggregates news stories from the previous 3 days to create a multi-level visualization of current events. Here's how they put it:

Like Kevin Bacon's co-stars, topics in the news are all connected by degrees of separation. To examine how every story fits together, News Dots visualizes the most recent topics in the news as a giant social network. Subjects—represented by the circles—are connected to one another if they appear together in at least two stories, and the size of the dot is proportional to the total number of times the subject is mentioned.

What separates this visualization from other treemaps like Newsmap is that News Dots shows interconnectivity. The smaller series of images above show how the array changes from day-to-day. The only constant? Barack Obama remains the Big Dot on Campus nearly every day.

Below is a screen capture of what happens when you mouse over a dot. The connections are highlighted in red and are listed in a pop up box. Typographically the site could use a lot of work, but the idea behind it is solid.