April 28th, 2008
by
Patrick Thornton
Ask everyone in your network to give you the date and details of one event in the scope of your beat and soon you’ll have a collective timeline.
With new tools like Dipity - it’s easier to do than you think.
Megan Taylor points to Dipity.com, an online timeline creator. If you haven’t tried xtimeline.com, this looks to be a similar service, with a different interface and some more AJAX/Web 2.0 pop-ups integrated. You can see an example on the Dipity company timeline here.
Dipity lets you upload photos and link to videos, and also geocode your timeline so that it has a map interface built in. You can also view events as a “flipbook,” a la iTunes’ music browsing feature. Dipity timelines are embedded using javascript (not iframes as is the case with xtimeline).
Our students at Eastern started working with xtimeline this semester. Next semester, we’ll probably give dipity a try. Either way, timelines can be an excellent way to add features to a multimedia story, as long as there’s an interesting time element.
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