Geoviu.com is a site that allows users to view world news items on a map. The home page of the site features a map of the world, with icons for the current hottest news stories showing where they originate from on the map. Hovering over an icon brings up a balloon window containing the title, description, location and source of the news story, and clicking on the icon takes you to the website where the story originated. There is a slider bar provided for zooming in on the map. Zooming in on a location brings up additional icons with local news stories for that area. News can also be viewed by a number of categories or filtered by Hour, Day, Week or Month. The available categories include Politics, Economy, Sustainability, Science, Technology, Society, Culture and Sports.

Users can also choose to view Hot stories or All stories. There are two search bars located at the top of the page – Location Search and Keyword Search. Location search will zoom the map to that location and show icons for any news stories originating from the location. The keyword search searches the entire news database and returns icons on the world map for stories that match the keyword. The site uses Google Maps as the source for its maps, and news stories come from trusted sources such as CNN, the BBC and the New York Times.

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Geoviu.com was launched in July 2009 and has undergone steady growth since launch.

Competition to Geoviu.com comes from sites such as Maplandia.com. Maplandia shows icons for news stories on a world map. Hovering over an icon only brings up a title and link to the news story for that location. There is no description, and all news on the Maplandia site comes from the BBC RSS newsfeed. Geoviu gives users a brief summary of the news story as well as its title, date and source, Also, the Geoviu site is more responsive than the Maplandia site.

The site is quite responsive, and filtering and searches return results quickly. Navigation is self-explanatory, with convenient links showing for the category and time filters. The news summaries are easy to select even when the map is showing a number of icons in the same area, and the map automatically moves to the right or left when viewing a story near the edge of the map.

There is no registration offered to the Geoviu.com site. Users simply navigate to the home page and begin using the site.

The service free to use. Also, no premium membership is offered to the Geoviu.com site.

The map interface is intuitive, and finding news for a given part of the world is actually quicker using the map interface than browsing to the section for that local area on another news site. The news coverage is quite comprehensive all the way down to the local city level, and the information comes from trusted sources.

• Shows a summary of currently popular world news stories as icons on a map
• Users can view news by category and time filters
• Users can view local news stories by zooming to a location on the map
• Location and keyword searches can be performed – search results are shown as icons on the map
• The map interface allows users to quickly locate the latest news for a given location
• News comes from trusted sources such as CNN, the BBC and the New York Times

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