>>The most popular stories occupy the largest rectangles while less popular stories fall into progressively smaller rectangles. You can see all the headlines and read any story just by clicking the headline.
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>>You can view several News Maps at the same time, each showing news from as many as 15 different news categories. The maps automatically refresh every 15 minutes and then show the movement of stories in respect of their growing or declining popularity.
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>Cool and simple, really nice, and can really turn one into a news addict.
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>The only thing missing is a bit of configurability of sources - unless you're not heavily relying on Google's format. As it is, there's no way to avoid the bias by selection / omission.

I will look into doing that. Now that the basics of the output/display is done it shouldn't be a big deal to allow changing the inputs.

If anyone is curious what a News Map looks like without downloading the actual program, here is a screenshot;

http://www.timbukone.com/newsmaps/images/news_map.jpg

In the program (as opposed to this simple screenshot) you can hover over any square to see the first few lines and the news source. Then clicking on the square loads a browser and takes you to the original story. The colour coding shows the changing popularity of the story.