Developed by Birmingham-based technology firm Daden, NewsGlobe can combine Google's geographic search engine Google Earth with the user's favourite RSS news feeds to present stories on a local, regional or international map.

The
application scans headlines for keywords that identify the location of
the story, and then presents them by headline with the location
pinpointed. A summary of the story appears when the user hovers over
the text and they can click through to the full story on the original
news site.

The popularity of RSS news feeds and projects such as BBC Backstage
has triggered a wave of creative RSS-based tools from the web
developing community, said Daden's managing director David Burden.

BBC
Backstage was launched in May and encourages developers to use selected
BBC content and software to create new applications. Recent
contributions to the project have been a Flash-based news reader
program and traffic maps.

“There has been an explosion of activity in the past four to five months driven by RSS,” said Mr Burden.

“Developers
are exploring the possibilities of moving information from one format
to another; this application simply uses Google Earth as a news
aggregator.”

As well as providing a geographical view of
breaking news, the application has interesting commercial possibilities
for companies with specific or wide ranging regional interests such as
estate agents or billboard advertisers.