New ways of seeing

I'm beginning to like looking at C |Net News' second column display. At the top of the right-hand column they place ads but go down just below those ads and you'll see a box with tabs labelled

The Big Picture | Related Stories | What's Hot | Latest Headlines

Related Stories and Latest Headlines are kind of yawners but I like The Big Piture and What's Hot (graphical view).

The Big Picture is an interactive mapping of related information/stories from the C|Net News site. Grey boxes represent news stories in the archive (the one you are reading should be in the center of the screen), green boxes are for topics (clusters of stories, I guess) and red boxes are for companies. The bigger the box the more articles associated with it. Lines link boxes that are related. For example there is a link between the red box for Apple (as a corporation) and a green box for OS X. Click on any of the boxes and the image will recenter onto the box you clicked on.

What's Hot (graphic) displays the 15 newest and most heavily read news articles in the C|Net collection. Articles are represented by blocks on the screen. Color and size matter. Lighter is newer and bigger has been read by more people than smaller.

Again, interesting to see where the links lead to.