If there is something that we really enjoy doing at Montage it is keeping on the pulse of the news, either in Bristol or worldwide any good Public Relations company should know whats going on, by the minute.

We use a number of news gadgets to keep on top of the news such as our News centre, with built in 24hr rolling news from Bloomberg,BBC and Sky.

I have blogged about my other favourite Digg swarm in the past, which is on my screen saver so I can see breaking news whilst on a telephone call! This shows bloggers swarming around a news story so I get a pretty good idea of what’s hot and what’s not.

They latest news visualisation is Metacarta, this shows news breaking across the world on a Google maps platform. It shows some heavy weight news on there from the likes of the news tech leaders such as Reuters, which have been using this since December. I like the fact that you can use a word search and reduce / increase timescales on news.

I" think that it is a shame that the lack of functionality regarding RSS and bookmarks let this product down":http://onlinejournalismblog.com/2008/03/26/mapping-news-just-got-a-kick-up-the-arse/, but it does give us another interesting way of digesting the news. Perhaps this is another nail in the hard copy news paper coffin? Time will tell.

I was disappointed not to see [MORE] Bristol news on the Metacarta news map, perhaps with the emergence of cutting edge online publishers such as Wildfire, this may help us to get back on the online news map?