Uncategorized - by Patrick Thornton on Monday, April 28, 2008 12:38 - 0 Comments

Potential Beat Blogging Project: Create a Collective Timeline

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.

dipity

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.

  blog it


Subscribe to BeatBlogging.Org via RSS.



Leave a Reply

Comment

About BeatBlogging.org

BeatBlogging.Org examines how journalists can use social networks, blogs and other Web tools to improve beat reporting.

Follow our social media maven @MsBeat on Twitter.

Interested in writing for BeatBlogging.Org? Become a guest writer.

About the Author
Patrick Thornton is the editor and lead writer of BeatBlogging.Org. He is @jiconoclast on Twitter.
Most popular posts