Dipity.com Dipity Blog

Over the past year, Washington Post has used Dipity on their home page and blog to cover some really engaging stories and breaking news events. They updated a Dipity timeline in realtime as 33 Chilean miners were rescued from their underground chamber, followed the Crafton Family’s sailing trip around the world and most recently, created an obituary timeline of Elizabeth Taylor’s life.

The paper has done some innovative and groundbreaking work with new technology for journalism. Washington Post is definitely a trailblazer and leader in the field. In addition, they also drive a lot of traffic to our site through embeds. As much as we appreciate our partnership with the Washington Post, we were even more thrilled to hear Deputy Editor, Cory Haik, talk a bit more in depth on how they utilize the Dipity platform.

Three time Pulitzer Prize winner Cory Haik

The following video is of Cory discussing the applications, pros and cons of Dipity for the Washington Post. To see video of the entire event, click here.

Here is (slightly edited) transcript of the presentation, as well as some of our thoughts on Cory’s points:

Cory: So this was something that we did in blogpost. As the miners were being rescued I had a producer work with this 3rd party tool Dipity, which is something that I used a lot in Seattle. It’s not pretty either. It’s this 3rd party timeline tool that can be embedded. And what we did, as each miner came out… and you can zoom into this and get specific times… we created a timeline of how they came out. And if you click into their name there’s thing that we could get like their date of birth, where they’re from, any photos that was included in these little data points on this map.

This got a phenomenal amount of traffic. To my knowledge, the (Washington) Post was the only one really kind of doing this live blog/timeline as they came out. And we kept it going until they were all up. And I bring it up because this page, it had incredible traffic but the bounce rate from this page was very high which means that people got here and they felt like, oh, this is not really a useful way to look at this, this s very hard. I’ve got to click into this. It’s really, you know, so what they did is they tried to zoom and that didn’t work out so they did this. (clicks on View in Dipity).

Because I am a nice person I didn’t take all this coding out of their embed.

Sorry Cory, but the code for the embed is done in a way to prevent this type of self-customization. Also, we’d love to make Dipity prettier. However, it’s function over form for the time being…

Cory: I mean I guess I could comment out some of the stuff and not view in Dipity, but it was breaking news and I wasn’t thinking , okay, how can I optimize to mitigate bounce rate and keep people on site. You just don’t think about those things. Miners are coming up and I want to capture it as it happens.

So, it’s a much better use experience here because you have a bigger screen. A lot of people did this. So, after this, I talked to producers and came up with best practices for using something like this. How do we optimize this 3rd party tool? How do we lower bounce rate? Okay, well that’s pretty easy. You put it in a different page, you embed it at a wider ratio and people won’t leave. Then we tried it, and that’s been true. But, am I upset that the bounce rate was so high? No. It’s fine.

That seems like a great work around, and Dipity still gets the embed traffic. It’s a win-win.

Audience member: There’s also another calculation here. It’s like, oh wait, were gonna use this tool over and over again. It doesn’t perform exactly the way we want it to, maybe we should build our own product. Does that come in? Where does that come in kind of thinking about Washington Post, sort of, in-house or something versus a third party service?

Cory: We’ve got tons of timeline tools, beautiful ones. They take a long time to build. One, a lot of them are in flash. That is not optimal for a lot of reasons. And I’m looking at raw HTML and having a producer build something on deadline. It’s just not easy to use.

We have definitely noticed some of the amazing in-house tools your team has developed for other stories. We totally get that Dipity isn’t perfect for everyone and we would love to hear your ideas on how we can expand our features and design to fit your individual needs. Let us know if you get a chance!

Anybody can use Dipity. It can be done very quickly. There’s a social element to it. This content also lives on the Dipity site so anyone else can also take this and embed that. That’s a service in my mind that’s quite different than just creating something for our site. It just does different things.

To me, it’s a constant sweat versus payoff. Am I gonna spend, you know, four hours building this flash timeline for breaking news, it just won’t do the job.

This part had us grinning from ear to ear. A big huge thank you to Media Future Now, The Washington Post and Cory!