Our Crypto News Heatmap is now live!
If you’re feeling nostalgic seeing this, it’s probably because you’ve been a very active news reader in 2010 and you might have heard about newsmap.jp when it launched in 2010.
Newsmap.jp (now defunct) was a visualization tool for Google news where you could see the entire news landscape in just one glance. The creator,
Marcos Weskamp (a data visualizer guy) thought it would be pretty cool if you could somehow figure out a way to visualize news using coloured tiles.
Newsmap.jp did something quite interesting. Marcos used tiles to represent articles, with the size of each tile determining how important the article is, and the colour of the tile representing what category the article was. He then used a TreeMap to figure out how to fit each tile into the screen and then end result was this.
All the articles were coming from Google News’s RSS feed and everything was made using Adobe’s flash.
It was an immediate sensation which went so viral that it even got featured in an HP TV ad called “Wall of touch”.
Today, however the site is now defunct. And all that remains of it are videos on YouTube and articles on how it worked.
But at CryptoControl, we decided that we really should do something to innovate and help make our web more appealing to our crypto-readers. While most of traffic was coming from the mobile app, we really wanted to do something with the website as well.
So hence, after 2 months of design, coding and testing, we came up with our own crypto news heatmap.
One of the biggest challenges we faced was to figure out how to categorize articles, so that we could colour-code each tile on the basis of which category it was.
For newsmap.jp, this was quite easy because they were getting all the data from Google News, which had a very powerful aggregation engine.
Whereas for us, we had created our own scrapers and algorithms. This meant that we also had to code and implement our own categorization engine as well.
And so we did. We looked different crypto news websites to see what were the prominent news categories that they had, and we eventually came down to 7. Governments, ICOs, Mining, Analysis, Exchanges, Blockchain and General.
With the categories in place, we took a sample set of 1000 articles for each category and used an AI to understand how likely is article supposed from either one of the categories.
And with that, we were ready! Ready to show people, what we had built. We did small alpha with friends and family, collected a bit of feedback and then decided to show Reddit what had built.
And Reddit showed us a lot love! We were in the top 5 of r/bitcoin and received a massive influx of traffic as people started sharing and using our tool.
This showed us that not only was there interest in heatmap like this, but the feedback and the comments also validated for us that what we made was actually something useful.
We hope that you too start using our newsmap and that you’ll also save time visiting multiple crypto news sources.
