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Built for the most recent Yahoo! Hack Day, NewsGlobe is a fun new way to browse Yahoo! News Top Stories. It pulls together two existing Yahoo! services and takes advantage of the performance enhancements in the latest Adobe Flash Player.

The NewsGlobe consists of three basic pieces: a Yahoo! News Top Stories RSS feed, a geo-encoding web service from Yahoo! Maps, and a free, open-source library of 3D classes for ActionScript 3 called Papervision3D. The application loads the Yahoo! News RSS feed every few minutes and extracts the dateline for each story. It sends this descriptive textual information to the Maps service to find a matching location and thereby return a latitude/longitude coordinate. Then it's simply a matter of using the 3D classes in ActionScript to create a visually engaging experience that's either automated or interactive.

Papervision3D makes it incredibly easy to create a 3D scene, add 3D objects to it, and specify where the camera (i.e., the user's viewpoint) should be located. For each story location where we could discern a lat-long coordinate, we draw a marker object and place it in the proper position on a sphere representing the Earth. The display is calculated and drawn in real time. This allows us to animate the view over time and even let the user change the view by interacting with the objects in the scene.

Since the final product itself is a SWF file, NewsGlobe works online as a web application or off -network as a scaled-down, embedded customizable badge. It could easily be integrated into a Yahoo! Widget or packaged as an Adobe AIR application to run locally on the desktop. By passing in different RSS feeds or search terms, it'd be possible to filter the news and watch stories occurring in a specific part of the world, from a particular category, or matching other keywords.

Who built it

• Lucas J. Shuman

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