Newsdot maps the news 

  Newsdot  is a new tool from Slate that displays a "social network" for topics in the news, be they people, organizations, or locations. Here's a look:  

     

 It uses a product called  Calais , which does automatic tagging of documents by finding keywords. You can try it out with any set of text with  their viewer . Here is a sample output from an article in the New York Times about the primary elections in Texas: 

     

 You can see that Calais has been able to identify all the Gov. Perry and Sen. Hutchison in addition to any pronouns or verbs that refer to them.  

 Some thoughts are below the fold.  


 
	 I love the idea of mapping the space of "news" and using tags is an creative way of doing this. One way of improving this whole enterprise would be to cluster the topics and use those clusters to color the dots instead of the type of "node" it is (currently, it's blue for countries, red for people, etc) 
        Calais is the kind of tool that really grabs my attention, much like  Mechanical Turk  did when I first heard about it. These types of products are going to completely change the way we do research. There used to be large barriers of entry to conducting research because of the resources needed to collect, manage and store data. Even just a few years ago, if you wanted to get a large dataset, you would have to either spend a lot of time or hire someone. Tools like Calais and mturk allow non-programmers to collect and manage data at much faster rates, for much cheaper. This opening up of data could shake up academia by increasing the speed of research production and allowing "startup" researchers to produce high-quality analyses. (Relatedly, the opening up of information (not limited to data) over the last decade lowered the cost of becoming an "expert" and altered the depth vs. breadth tradeoff.)