Michael Perkins

News Dots  is a cool new service on Slate.com that represents current topics in the news as nodes in an interactive visual network. The network graph shows the relationships between the topics in addition to the importance of each topic.

News Dots uses Calais to automatically tag news stories from major publications. Relationships are established by identifying tags that appear together in the same stories. The visualization tool was built using flare, an ActionScript library for building interactive flash visualizations.

Click here to check it out.