World news attention

Hard not to love this. Ethan Zuckerman has a system that watches Google News (among others) for mentions of the countries of the world, and then plots their frequency on a map of the world. This is a very simple, and very clever, thing to do. I was ready for some cringeworthy wild assumptions about what this meant, given that it wasn’t coming from someone who necessarily looks at global news flows in general, and was pleasantly surprised to find a nice discussion of what this means and how it can be used. (OK, the example of “Scotch whiskey” needing to be disambiguated from other Scotch things was a bit off kilter; what other Scotch things would that be?)

Interesting stuff, well worth checking out. I suspect the link is already everywhere on the blogosphere, and if it’s not, it should be..