A snapshot of world news on one page

Marumushi.com may have accomplished what avid news readers have been looking for: a snapshot of world news all on one page.

Most news readers are accustomed to shifting through multiple screens of information, simply because the amount of news is impossible to capture on one page. Previous attempts have either strained the eyes or lost the ability to give prominence to the big stories. Marumushi's newsmap gets around that by using different-sized boxes, colour coding and tabs to keep major news stories at the top of the page. The site offers eight categories of news, and users can clicks on tabs to see what stories are dominant in any given region. There may still be some eye strain, but the site is based on the idea that the smaller the story, the less interesting it will be to the general reader.

That means users shouldn't expect unbiased coverage. Marumushi isn't a news organisation and the site pulls all of it stories from Google' news search. Since the site collects stories from Google, which it turn just collects stories from new organisations around the world, coverage of certain events are much heavier than others. Those stories are given higher prominence on the page. Marumushi claims that its site actually shows media bias, and can even magnify it, on any given subject.

There are a few other drawbacks, too. Despite that fact the stories come Google, users can't search for stories. The site only offers a look at the major stories of the day.

Another annoying fact is that you can't choice the version of the story you read, one of the prime advantages to using Google news search. Even though moving the mouse over the headlines will show additional information from the story and even tell you the number of related stories, clicking on the headline will land you, well, who knows? The site would be much better is clicking on the headline directed used back to Google's news page.

But for anyone happy with just a snap shot of the news landscape, the site has possibilities.