Show HN: A New Tool to Understand and Visualize the News | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: A New Tool to Understand and Visualize the News

newsphere.org

90 pointsbmusto1953 comments

Hi there! My friend and I are working on a website called The Newsphere and we’re looking for others who share our interest in understanding current events to help us beta test our platform. The Newsphere acts as a virtual map of world news, enabling users to see the news as the result of a complex web of relationships between people, places, organizations, and countries. You can watch our intro video on youtube here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wpwgat54KXg&t=3s and signup for the beta here: https://newsphere.org or keep reading to learn more about the Newsphere.

Basically, our model analyzes thousands of news articles every day, and uses natural language processing to extract the different entities in them, as well as identifying relationships between them. Over time we construct narratives, which the user can see illustrated on a graphical timeline. The goal here is to give context to current events, enabling users to view recent developments in light of past patterns of behavior.

If you’re interested in learning more, you can email us directly at questions@newsphere.org and we’ll be happy to get back to you. Again, you can sign up for our beta here: https://newsphere.org

Thanks again!

Very interesting. I signed up for the beta.

I really like your timeline concept. I'd almost maybe double down on that, and move away from the graph model (where the geometric layout is not really grounded to an easily accessible mental model). I'm not sure what the ideal looks like, but my hunch is the timeline view might be at the center of it.

Similar opinion here. I had a lot of trouble grasping the idea until a minute into the video where you show the timeline aspect. I'd try to explore some other UI layouts. There's something a bit off in making a user click the graph, move eyes down to the timeline, then back up to the article.

(thinking aloud, Perhaps de-emphasize the graph (make it smaller?) and make the timeline vertical / leftish-center? then give the article more room for reading. Or possibly put graph&timeline at top then the article below so the article can be viewed in full & scrolled without any frame windowing.)

I really like the graph model. I don't necessarily prefer it over the timeline model, but in general people learn/grasp concepts and topics differently. For me personally, it helps to visualize in multiple ways and even just seeing the connection between nodes is incredibly helpful. I think more ways to visualize is better than just picking one. Not disagreeing though it may be best for the timeline to be the center of it.

Thank you for the feedback! We're also really liking the timeline aspect of the stie, but we still think there's ways to incorporate at least some sort of graph model as well. This might be something we'd A/B test

Perhaps more or a PCA graph would work, where there is a clear grounding of the math in how you are generating it. Or perhaps a tree structure. I think showing connections is good, just think the timeline at the moment seems very promising.

Looks promising. Consider dynamic node sizing/coloration to indicate activity/trends. Looking forward to participate.

Interesting! I'd love to watch the video on the front page, but it won't work on Safari.

Or Chrome on iOS.

That's also Safari

The video doesn't load either on Firefox / Linux. There is not error message in the console.

Playback works correctly on Chromium / Linux .

We're working on fixing the video on our site, if you'd like you can watch it on youtube here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wpwgat54KXg&t=3s

We've updated the frontpage so that the video plays from youtube now, let us know if you guys keep running into issues watching it!

Looks really cool. This could really pave the way for something fantastic.

Thanks, we think so as well :)

Just a sugegstion. Rather than the "Clear. Concise. Comprehensive" tagline, write a one sentence summary of what it DOES.

Agreed with this. If the premise of the service is that the news is clear, concise, and comprehensive, show me that with a clear and concise explanation of the product on the front page (and perhaps a comprehensive drill-down in the rest of the site). I care far more about the UX of the tool than the ML behind the scenes.

Good point, that's definitely a suggestion we'll incorporate into the site!

Sooner you can have a workable current affair as part of your front page, the better. You could even have subdomains or special features on major events, even a dedicated domain (China, impeachment, etc). Looks like one of those things best understood by clicking around. Best of luck.

Not sure if he'd have useful info or time to spare, but I think Austen from Lambda School had a news-related venture (Grasswire or something) in the past and could have feedback for you.

Thanks for the feedback! That's something we've been thinking of implementing, perhaps with a search feature as well. And we'll definitely try to reach out to Austen, especially with his success in the startup world. Are there any other people/ companies/ startups you'd suggest reaching out to for feedback? We've mainly talked to professors/ business leaders from Brandeis University and a few professionals in the news industry.

I'd almost ignore the traditional news industry. You're trying to do something new and many won't understand it or have useful tips in 2019. Just make sure you have easy to find and share deep-dive topic pages and you'll soon discover whether people are interested or not in this style of presentation.

Makes sense. Do you mean deep-dive topic pages on specific events such as the syrian civil war, for example?

Yep, exactly like that. IMO you want to be the single best page on the internet for something like that. More interactive than a Wikipedia page, broader content than a news item, etc.

Is the "play" icon supposed to indicate a video? Clicking it does nothing.

All I get is the slowly-appearing stock clip art lower on the page, which doesn't really explain it at all.

Didn't work for me either on Android Firefox, but played in Chrome.

What browser were you using? We've mostly been testing the site on Chrome and Safari.

On Firefox (Windows), the .hero-media::before element is disabling interaction with the video controls. Add pointer-events: none to the element to fix this.

I'm using Safari 12.

Not working on windows firefox either!

Neither Chrome or Safari on iOS (iPad) will play the video. Just a blank with a play button.

Video does not play on iPad.

We're working on fixing the website video, in the meantime we have the video up on youtube here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wpwgat54KXg&t=3s

Additionally we have a one page PDF summary here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1-D7MmRph8mRC9MUL55Vh5hNy...

I like the timeline idea. What's up with the Instagram/Dell/Unilever/Uber logos? Why are they there?

Thanks! Those logos were actually left behind from the website template we were using and have been removed.

Looks like a cool project. I'll sign up for the beta.

How many news sites are you pulling content from? I'm curious about how, or if, you're getting content from news sites that have subscriptions - e.g. The New York Times. Do you store archives of information?

I know news articles can get updated or lost. It would be interesting to keep track. I can imagine using this or something like it when writing a book or an article and the author may want to understand relationships over time.

Thanks! Currently for our MVP just AP News, which we're getting from here: https://newsapi.org/. We're working on perfecting the site with one or two news sources first before expanding to more options. Definitely a good point about articles changing/ getting updated, something we'll be looking into how to address going forward.

I'm working on something very similar. I do also have built a feature similar to the timeline. (your version is much cooler.)

I had a question. Mostly the title are clickbait and doesn't represent what actually news is and many news site are biased and distort the meaning by carefully selecting the words.

How do you handle it or have plan to do it?

It's great to know other people are also trying to tackle this problem! I agree, the titles of news stories are often to grab one's attention rather than convey the true contents of a story, and we're still trying to solve this problem. Perhaps some feature that visualizes the mood/ topic of a story based on the full text, but it's a difficult problem to solve. We're open to suggestions though!

One solution i can think of it to not use the title. Rather use the backlink text. Found it more useful and descriptive.

This is involve crawling irrelevant page or probably the whole internet.

Could you explain this a bit more? I'm not sure I'm following how this would be implemented

I wanted to do something very similar. This is amazing! May I ask, where do you get your news feed from? The sources I enquired at the time were quite pricey.

We've been using https://newsapi.org/

I think you'll need some major UX work done. It looks like a product made by engineers so far..

For sure, our beta is pretty bare bones but we'll refine it over the next few months, especially after we get feedback from our planned beta launch at the end of the month

Is there a demo or set of screenshots for the tool? I would like to learn more before signing up for a beta.

Our demo video is on the main page of our site and can be found on youtube here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wpwgat54KXg&t=3s

Additionally you can check out our one page user guide PDF here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1-D7MmRph8mRC9MUL55Vh5hNy...

The PDF also includes a link to a more in depth explanation of Newshpere

Nice idea, I signed up.

Curious to see how you handle weighting/filtering of the sources, the whole "fake news" issue.

Not your primary concern, I'm sure, but I don't (normally) use Google, nor allow Google-tools into my browser. I am a small-but-vocal minority. There are good alternatives to Google's recaptcha, Google-docs registration, etc. Just sayin'.

Great point, we'll have to work on that going forward. We've been using AP News as our main source for the moment as it is fairly neutral, but we're looking for ways to handle different sources going forward. We went with google but are open to other suggestions for future forms

I strongly suggest you make it user-configurable, history shows it's difficult for any individual to reliably predict what news is fake vs not. Rather, tools such as this might actually help one differentiate, provided the news sources aren't censored.

User-configurable does sound like a good option, hopefully something we can integrate into the site soon

One this is out of beta how much will it cost?

We are still working on our pricing model but right now we are looking at a doing freemium model. Free version would have some limitations (ex: a limited number of news sources that stories can be pulled from, so choosing 3 sources from list of options) but the average user would still get a ton out of the site. Premium version would be subscription based, giving users full range of features (ex: pulling from as many news sources as you wish). We would love feedback on any suggestions for pricing though, we'll be tinkering and tailoring it based on how the beta goes/ what changes we make to the site + idea

We've created a slack channel to continue the discussion and receive feedback on our site. You can join here: https://join.slack.com/t/newspherecommunity/shared_invite/en...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com