Wednesday, February 15, 2006

Assault on the senses


Part of the benefit of the web is that allows you access to more information than you could possibly process.

PointCast push software was to information what loft apartments were to New York real estate. It flaunted its riches of information in a constantly moving colour display that was enough to turn your average epilepsy sufferer into a world-champion break dancer.

Push technology died and was then resurrected in budget form as RSS feeds and channels for podcasting.

However Coolhunting.com came up with a couple of sites that capture PointCast's fountain of information feel.

News map represents stories based on their importance and how they relate to each other in a chaotic mess that works. It has the same colour for a particular category and represents the amount of media coverage for a story by the size of the text.


Whatsup looks like the kind of dynamic stylised map that would be more at home on the big screen in a Bond villain's living room and maps stories to geography.

Usability be damned its cool as.