Newsmakers on the map is a design for a widget or html module that tracks the hot topics in news based on geographic locations. You mouse over or click on a particular region on the map to see the people that are getting the most coverage by the press in that region. You can then select one of those topics below the map and see the top 4 headlines from the sources in that region writing about that person.

Here is a design for a smaller version that can be developed as a grabbable widget.

Read more below to see what methodologies and API calls you will need to implement this design.

This is still an idea, but if you would like to give it a life - let us know.

I have written a PHP script that generates RSS feeds for articles by calling Daylife's search APIs for any topic, queries, tags or events happening in the world.

Each item in the RSS feeds contains an article headline, description, published time and link to the original source of the article. To produce a desired RSS feed of your interest, you can use the script that I have hosted by forming a URL that looks like:

http://www.buzzingblog.com/dayliferss/rss.php?query=<search term of your choice>

For e.g.,

http://www.buzzingblog.com/dayliferss/feed.php?query=Barack%20Obama

Read more about Daylife's Search query syntax to form your queries intelligently.

You can also specify the number of items you want to pull in the feed using a limit parameter. So your final URL will looks like

http://www.buzzingblog.com/dayliferss/feed.php?query=Barack%20Obama&limit=20

The last parameter that the script allows is source_filter_id. Read more about source filters here to learn how you can restrict your search to a limited number of sources.

With the availability of RSS feeds on top of the Daylife API, opportunities to build news applications are endless. The script calls the Daylife API on every request and builds the RSS feed in real time. Webmasters can use RSS generator to produce feeds on desired topics to feed them their Drupal/Joomla or any other RSS supported content management systems.

You can download the script and run it on your own server, in case, you want to customize it. You will need to substitute your own accesskey and shared secret that you received from Daylife to make the script work.