Dipity. (Timeline Tool)

Dipity is an interactive web-based timeline tool. It’s easy to use and helps reporters organise mass amounts of information into a format that looks great on the web and allows audience to enter the story in a different way. Dipity’s timeline format has a small learning curve compared to other timeline soft wares.
Pros:

• Dipity is easy — easy to make, easy to update, easy to embed.
• Users can follow the timeline to be notified of updates, which makes Dipity great, not just for traditional timeline stories, but for ongoing stories such as earthquakes in a given city over time.
• Allows users to pull in data updated in real time, such as the last 100 tweets from a local politician.
• Viewers can contribute to time lines (this feature can be turned off).

Cons:

• Money: With the free account, you can create three time lines and paid plans start at $4.95 per month for 10 time lines with a big jump to unlimited for $49.95 per month.

Let’s get started:
Make a free account and click “create a timeline.”

Input a name and description for your timeline. Choose a timezone, a category, upload an image icon and manage the permissions. Click “continue to add events.”
Dipity allows TONS of different methods for inputing events on the timeline. For most of the events, they automatically update, although I’m not sure how useful most of this would be.
Using an email address or username you can import recent play history from Pandora, a user’s 100 most recent Delicious bookmarks, 100 most recent tweets or 20 most recent YouTube videos. The timeline creator can also pull tweets, Flickr photos, YouTube videos and items from Google News based on a keyword search. This is very cool when using this resource as a research scaffold...

The real nit-and-grit of Dipity is its interface for entering single events. 

Enter information for the event title and date. This information will show on the front of the event, and users will have to click the event to see the description. The timeline looks much better if each event has a picture, although adding pictures is sometimes not an option depending on the topic. Creators can also add a video URL, link (such as a link to a corresponding news story) and the location.

Be aware: When inputting a date, Dipity forces you to enter a day, month and year. This is frustrating if an event spanned a year, occurred over a date range or the specific date is unknown.
Press “add event.”
When all the events are uploaded, press the yellow “continue” button.

The next screen is for advanced settings. Default zoom manipulates the time the viewer will see in a single screen. For example, if you were making a timeline on a shooting that latest several hours, the zoom would be best set to half hour, but if you were making a timeline on the history of the universe, you would select 5,000 years. Don’t stress out about it too much — automatic usually works well enough.

Center on Date lets you change the date in the middle of the user’s default screen. Pick the climax of your timeline or the most important event and let users see the rising and falling actions. Tag keywords to help your timeline group with time lines of similar subjects (“crime,” “earthquake,” etc.). Choose a comments option and theme and click “save and view.”
 
To embed your timeline, click “embed” in the right corner of the timeline box.

The embed code is at the top in HTML, along with some options with customizing the timeline’s size and color.

Had success using this resource? Share your experience both positive and negative in the comment section.

 
 Shaun