Finding a lot of uses for the web tool Dipity – and it seems plenty of others are too. If you haven’t seen it yet, this a neat way to create interactive timelines.
I like it for the following reasons;
1. It’s so easy to use. Both to create content and to interact with. I’ve found it very intuitive.
2. Versatile. Video, pictures and text is easily interchangeable by manually adding content or you can simply plug in a RSS feed and let the content automatically update.
2. Controllable. Can set it to be one editor (i.e. the creator) who controls it or for multiple authors.
3. Easy to share. It integrates well with other platforms. I’ve embedded it into our templated work pages and sent the links below automatically to this blog.
Just two imperfections I’ve encountered so far. 1. couldn’t get the embed code to work on this blog. A twitter user recommends adding a word, any word, in between the tags to fix that. 2. Every page refresh, addition etc. adds up as a page view – good for the ego maybe but not reliable enough. Hoping these glitches will be sorted in the next promised release.
I’ve created three timelines, called topics in the Dipity world, which you can see here: http://www.dipity.com/user/sarahhartley
One is fed from my food blog, one is fed by the mutiple users of the MEN Flickr picture group and the other is a mix of newspaper, television and transport authority content to track the progression of Manchester’s proposed Congestion Charge scheme.
So far so good and I’m sure there’ll be plenty more journalistic uses for it in the coming months.
I see that journalists on other newspapers are already well on with the use of this too. Below are great examples from Liverpool and Birmingham.
20/08: Diary of a day in the life of Liverpool
Gun and knife crime in the Birmingham area
Posted using ShareThis
If you’ve been using this tool, please add to a link to your example below – we can build up a map of maps. A Dipity day.
Dim Sum Digital 