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.

These types of sites are also good for multimedia journalism classes, as using them can force students to think chronologically about a story outside the narrative writing process.

In honor of Earth Day, Vanderbilt’s student media mothership InsideVandy presents a multimedia package called “The Green Tour.” There are stories, a video, audio slideshow, a map and a timeline. Each multimedia element pops up in a “lightbox” over the web page (Lightbox 2 source code here).

The entire thing is built into an HTML web page - not a Flash interface. This just proves that you don’t have to shoehorn everything into Flash to make a decent multimedia package.

Anyone else do something for Earth Day? Drop a comment or e-mail me - scmurley -at- gmail.com, and I’ll post the links.

UPDATE: Rich Cameron has a few ideas for ways to use Sprout Builder. 

Sprout Builder is another site that lets you create simplified multimedia projects and embed them into a website or on a weblog. The controls are relatively easy to understand (as compared to Flash). Here’s a sample widget I created a few minutes ago:

Sprout is similar to Toufee, a web-based Flash project creator that I’ve been trying out. The big difference so far is that Sprout seems easier to use and actually works. I’ve had problems with getting Toufee’s new interface to work.Why would this be of interest to college media types? Ease of use, built-in social networking publishing options, and training to think about multimedia projects and the stories they tell without having to get ugly with Flash and ActionScript.

h/t TechCrunch

Adobe just launched their free online version of Photoshop. Here’s a post from TechCrunch that talks in a little more details about the site.I tried to get a log-in this morning, and it took over an hour to get the verification e-mail. Also, I could not get the interface - a Flash-based interface - to load in Firefox when I tried it at first. Safari loaded it fine and I got my log-in. Here’s a link to the first photo I played around with.Most college media operations already have copies of Photoshop available, but here’s another potential for ways to get the non-photojournalist used to uploading and editing photos. It might even be a way to save funds on full copies of Photoshop for people who don’t do much more than adjust curves. As a side note, I’m always taking screen grabs for the weblog, and have to resize and optimize the images for the web using the “save for web” tool in PS. Online editing tools might be the way I want to go in the future to avoid that hassle.

We’ve mentioned Coveritlive before here. Today, I got an e-mail from the team responsible about some of the new features they’ve added. More below the fold.

(more…)