Slate has introduced a News Dots visualizes the most recent topics in the news as a giant social network. Subjects—represented by the circles below—are connected to one another if they appear together in at least two stories, and the size of the dot is proportional to the total number of times the subject is mentioned. (thanks to The Centered Librarians for the link)

Here is a screen capture of the news dot (the bigger the dot the more citations to that article in Slate):

Aviary slatest-slate-com Picture 1

To view the details of a dot simply hover your mouse over it:

connect the dots