More about Bubbling and Context

Here's an interesting bubble: "seahawks"

Now I don't know anything about American Football and who's hot right now, cause I don't follow sports in general, but using the BubbleSphere, I can find out a lot of information really quickly about who the Seahawks are as a team, who are their top newsworthy players, and more information that I can grab from looking at just one page with 30 images on it.

Some quick observations from the first page:

• First thing I notice is their logo... the bluish and greenish eagle head
• The first bubble from the center says "seattle" and has their logo again... this is information that will always be associated with seahawks because most places mention the city along with the name of the team
• The second bubble says "Matt Hasselbeck" who I'm assuming is their quarter-back since the next bubble after that is "quarterback".
• Looking at the feeds using "seahawks" most, I see that NewsBubbles is actually pulling from four different sections of the seattle times, who mention the seahawks the most... the front page, the seahawks section, the sports section, and the local section, which, in the last 45 days from Nov 26th, 2008, happened to mention them in 34 articles.

There is obviously way more to see on the first page, but for the sake of the fact that you have to read this article, I'll keep it to that... some other things there were: Jim Zorn, Deion Branch, Seneca Wallace, Washington, Cardinals, Sunday, Victory, and some other things like tuesday, night, play, game, etc... if I drilled-down on these, I would find out more contextual information about them, but I just want to know who this "Mike Holmgren" guy is, cause I saw him pretty close to the top of the list.

• I double-click "mike holmgren"... When you double-click something in the bubble spiral, you add it to what's in the middle, or the focus, thus drilling down on it.
• Looking at the "seahawks mike holmgren" bubble, the first bubble next to that is "coach", so I'm assuming that he's their coach. In this spiral, I also notice that it's his final season, one bubble says.

I could take these bubbles back into time as well, but this is just one example of how I can get a lot of information and very current information about what's going on with whatever I'm bubbling, within seconds. Things I would have to read and scan the entire wiki page of the seahawks, or google to figure out, much less just buy a recent book about them... but I'm not in to sports all that much. However, if I wanted to have a conversation where I look like I know what I'm talking about, I could sit on NewsBubbles for 10 minutes or so and get all of the latest players, happenings, events, trades, game results, etc., on the seahawks.

The pictures really help and a lot of the times are in the context of what I'm looking at, and the words associated with them.

NewsBubbles and the power of Context-Time Exploration

The Bubble Time Machine!

It's not absolutely complete yet... but I've been playing with it in pre-release mode and want you guys to see the power of it before It's released.

I've been studying the relationship between the words "crisis" and "stimulus" using NewsBubbles.org, my news exploration tool. The system basically works through extracting all of the "subject clauses" or bubbles from the articles of majorly syndicated news networks, and then builds a relationship matrix, showing you what other words are most mentioned in the news along with the phrase you put in.

The Buble Time Machine is powerful, because since you're browsing through the context of things, you can now see what the context was yesterday, or a year ago for your bubbles... for instance... look at these two different dates for obama. One when he was just a candidate, one when it was just him and mccain, one when he was elected, and one now that he's president-elect.

January of this Year - Notice the second thing on his list is Clinton : there were 100 articles syndicated about him every 8 days or so.

The end of September - Up against McCain, they had the debates... some of the issues they talk about are listed there too : 100 articles in 6 days related to obama

Election Day - Notice election is about the 5th most related word to obama behind mccain, ofcourse

Day after Election - VICTORY! lol... victory for obama, second bubble on the list... behind his full name... they seem to mention his full name almost every time in their articles. : 100 articles in one day

November 25th - 20 days after his victory, and he's now offering the stimulus package for the economic crisis... etc. etc.. : Notice he's gotten much more coverage now.. over 100 articles in 1 day about obama

This is just an example of what you can compare... I've been looking at the word "crisis" and found some interesting things, looking back. You'll see the options for the date slider coming soon in the user interface for NewsBubbles

When you look at the bubbles through time and how they change, they tend to tell the story without you having to actually read much besides the words that actually matter. Keep in mind that the sources I'm using are top news media organizations... wether you trust them or not, this is not telling their story, this is just telling you what they say mostly, in relation to whatever you want.

Stay tuned for more NewsBubbles Updates