Uncategorized - by Patrick Thornton on Monday, April 28, 2008 12:38 - View 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.

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About BeatBlogging.org

BeatBlogging.org was a grant-funded journalism project that studied how journalists used social media and other Web tools to improve beat reporting. It ran for about two years, ending in the fall of 2009.

New content is occasionally produced here by the this project's former editor Patrick Thornton. The site is still up and will remain so because many journalists and professors still use and link to the content. BeatBlogging.org offers a fascinating glimpse into the former stages of journalism and social media. Today it's expected that journalists and journalism organization use social media, but just a few years ago that wasn't the case.

About the Author of this post
Patrick Thornton is the editor and lead writer of BeatBlogging.Org. He is @pwthornton on Twitter.