Directions Magazine’s NewsMap Features - Search and Display
We lauched NewsMap today...perhaps you've already seen it on our "yellow tab" on Directions Magazine. Our friends at Spatial Ideas developed this version of their LocoBuzz web mapping application specifically for us so that we could display our press releases and blog posts in a geographical index. I've been wanting to do this for years...kinda made sense for an online geospatial technology magazine to actually use a web map app in some way, no?
You'll note that we've released this in "beta" for now and we're interested in your feedback. But I encourage you to play around with its features.
For example (refere to image at right; click for larger graphic), the first thing you will notice is that there are a few symbols on the map with numbers in the middle. Keep clicking on the symbol (hopefully that's intuitive" and you'll zoom into the area of interest; more symbols may appear but hovering the mouse over the symbol will display a box with a brief caption of a press release or article. You'll see the headline and first few lines of the text. You can dismiss the box or click on the "newspaper" icon to go directly to the full version of the article; click the Facebook icon to post to Facebook.
You can also search for news. Use the search box to type in a word or phrase and it will search a 30-day archive of news. Check the "Get Latest Tweets" box and it will add tweets as well. Check the "Hide News" box to see only tweets. Check "Refresh" to bring you back to the original news selections.
At the bottom of the map is our news scroll for the past 24-hours. This will show you the latest news in the form of scolling boxes. Click the "i" icon to zoom into the location of the news and to display the news box. Click anywhere on the map and the scroll box turn into a single scroll line. Double-click the scroll line to go back to the scroll boxes.
For more information about the technology behind NewsMap, see our article today on our home page of Directions Magazine.
