Newzbubble is a fun news application that allows you to see which subjects have the most news about them. I’ve been meaning to write about it for a few weeks now, but have been sidetracked – it’s a great example of web technology coming out of Africa. It’s unique, fun and interesting.
Think of it as a completely visual execution of tags. No words are necessary, until you put your mouse over a bubble. It’s a fun way to interact with the news. At the top of the page, you can sort the news by the region/topic that you are interested in.
You can also get a cool little widget to put on your blog/website. What I love about this is that I think the widget will be as popular as the actual newzbubble.com site. It plays directly off of the thoughts that Om Malik mentioned in his recent Business 2.0 article on “the Widgetization of the Web“. What it does is take the current page that you’re on, reads the tags (words), and renders them in bubbles which are sized depending on the number of times a word appears. Go get your widget here.
Vincent Maher, the creator of Newzbubble, is one of those really smart chaps that you wish you could sit down and talk to for a couple hours.
[Note: There is a very interesting debate going on right now between a couple of my favorite African bloggers. It’s over the African Digital Indaba on Blogging and is best read here and here.]
September 15, 2006 at 10:15 am
Actually what I would like is a tutorial on all things connected with web design, using widgets and html codes and stuff. One of these days I will actually take a class.
Why does the widge designer want me tosign on immediately? I want to see how it looks like first before I put it on my blog.
Have a good weekend
September 15, 2006 at 11:48 am
You can actually see it on my blog. Scroll down and look in the right margin.
As far as hot to use it (and yes, he needs to put a FAQ up on that), you just copy that code and paste it into your blog’s sidebar. Now, I can tell you exactly how to do that with WordPress, but if you’re on another platform, you’re on your own.
On WordPress go into “Presentation” > “Theme Editor” > “Sidebar”. Paste the code. That easy.
September 16, 2006 at 1:49 pm
The FAQ is on it’s way. I’ve been a bit hectic with the Blogging Indaba and all so not much time to work on the outstanding useability issues. Gimme a few days and it will be there. I have plans to enable users to pick the foreground and background colors too. Thanks for the great feedback though.
September 18, 2006 at 1:05 pm
Don’t know if you’ve seen Murashami’s Newsmap but it’s a similar idea though I like the use of text a bit more.
September 18, 2006 at 8:42 pm
Hi there Hash,
Long time no chat!
Listen I saw this and thought of your new African innovations site. It may already be old news to you! Let me know what you think: http://www.yan-koloba.com/yan-koloba.html