NewsFlash is an ambient visualization of the state of world news. It attempts to aggregrate hundreds of articles from hundreds of news sources into an abstract pattern from which a person can, at a glance, get a feel for what is going on different parts of the world.

   It does this by parsing 64 RSS feeds from Google News, each focused on a specific country. The counries top 64 GDPs in the world are used. The parser examines articles in each RSS feed for keywords indicating whether or not the article is positive or negative, and scores it appropriately. These scores are weighed based on the number of news sources covering that specific event. Also, the parser compares the volume of articles about different countries, and uses this to attempt to judge how much of the global focus is on that country.

   To signal countries that are currently the focus of global headlines, the parser assigns blue dots to countries which are at the forefront of the world news feeds (top 10 articles).