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After TimeTube’s resounding success, we decided to show that it’s not just videos that can be organized and displayed in a more interesting way. Next up were photos, so naturally: Time + Flickr = Tickr!

The images themselves are really stunning (thanks Flickr users!), but it’s also a really neat way to explore a topic (or your own Flickr account).

Seeing is believing, so try some searches and have some fun.

Some that caught our eye were:

• Burning Man: Artists really know how to make things look amazing :). Get a recap of the best from each of the last few years.
• September 11th: This one is sad and heart-warming at once. You can see the the old New York skyline, the day-of from around the city, and then the memorials shine into the sky.
• Northern Lights: Experience the phenomenon as seen from around the world, and as it changes year to year.

Hope you’ll try it out, and remember to write in with your thoughts and favorite searches!

Those Google guys are always coming up with nifty ideas. Today it’s a new collaboration feature for Google Maps:

Now imagine if all the surfers around the globe worked together, leveraging their combined knowledge to create a single map of the best surf spots worldwide, applying the power of wiki-style collaboration to cartography.

Now, if someone could only do that for timelines!

Here’s an interesting illustration of a batter’s swing over time, making an intriguing 3D timeline of sorts. Not a bad video either..

From the moframes website:

‘the single frames of a pre-keyed film sequence are arranged one behind the other in a three-dimensional space. In this way a complex movement is being captured in its whole length and turned into graphic information.’

(Via moframes and Designboom)

Interesting printed timeline of events in the Bible. They only give you this snippet, but think it covers up to 6000 years worth of information.

The ” Amazing Bible Timeline Poster “

Cabinet Magazine is one of the best magazine’s around for the money. They consistantly take any old subject (like the sea, ruins, or weather), and turn it around into highbrow wordsmithery.

Anyhow, way back in their 13th issue, Futures, they had a few timeline related articles, notably one entitled The Trouble with Timelines. This article is fun and a must-read for anyone interested in this stuff.

At the end of the article is a clever, and appropriately titled timeline: A Timeline of Timelines. Please take some time out and read these two articles.

A few days ago, NPR did a segment on the current state of affairs for the Iraq War called The Toll of War.

They’ve been touting an interactive timeline on the air, and are encouraging listeners to check it out. Two distinct and separate friends (in separate states, even) have called to tell me about it, so I checked it out. Here are my thoughts.

Initially, when I brought up the NPR timeline, it wasn’t working properly … perhaps they didn’t have all the infomation uploaded, or it might have been a Macromedia Flash issue (sometimes happens with Flash), but it was very confusing to attempt to click around and not get anything to happen. After a couple of tries, I dismissed it as ‘broken’ and moved on.

After another friend called and said he’d heard about the NPR timeline, I checked it out again. Much better! Everything’s functioning, and it’s actually a pretty nice piece of work. They’ve incorporated audio and images, and it seems to give the viewer a good sense of what’s happened.

All in all, the best part about this timeline is that it validates what T1ME is trying to accomplish. Woohoo!

If you’re poking around online right now, and happen to be thinking about timelines, you can’t get too far without coming across the MIT Simile: Timeline. It’s a VERY cool step in the right direction for those concerned with timelines and how they can be brought to the public. They’re happily sharing their code, too. Definitely check it out.

Initially… as with most new tools, I fumbled around with how to use it, and just exactly what I was looking at. After a few minutes of playing around with the UI, however … I became more accustomed to their scrolly navigation. It seems to work well.. and is good at showing you more information in a small-ish space, which is a big concern.

Their ’stock’ timeline example shows off not only events along the timeline, and some ajaxy interactivity, but start/finish information. On the religion example, they’ve attempted to highlight various words that user defines as a way to help with scanning and clarity. I like the idea there, but find it a bit cumbersome, at least from the beginning. Perhaps there’s a better way to do this. (There is!)

All-in-all, Simile: Timeline is a large step forward in timeline evolution, and is truly inspiring. I could only hope that we might collaborate in the near future.

Here’s a classic timeline that is/was ahead of it’s time. Is that possible?

The Baby Name Voyager has helped countless folks follow trends dealing with boys and girls names. At it’s core, it’s a tool that allowed users to type in a name and dynamically watch that name’s popularity trends over the last 120 years. If you prefer, you can choose ALL and see a wavy graphic of all the names over time. From here you can easily scroll over the pink and blue ‘trend’ lines to see the corresponding names. The visualization is surprisingly easy to use assuming you have to have a decent computer that can render quickly.

The Baby Name Voyager has faithfully served as a high quality example of a progressive timeline’s usefulness.

Of note is the use of Java (versus Flash or Ajax), which I’ve been told is especially adept at handling larger quanitities of information . We’ll check in on this at a later date.

Another inspiring and useful timeline, The Arrow of Time by Diego Goldberg gives the view a sense of time not only because of the dates associated with the pictures, but the pictures themselves.

I seem to remember someone else making a video showing a series of self portraits, one shot every day, for something like 3 years or so. It was amazing and inspired, to say the least. I’ll see if I can’t find it.

Eternal Egypt is a nice and very thorough overview of Egypt’s history past and present. It’s a terrific site that has many decent qualities.. but the most important to us, of course, is the Flash-based timeline.

It’s a really good example of how a great deal of information can be put together and made to work. They’ve got a really long timeline list, and a way to sort through a few categories (artifacts, characters, places, etc). The timeline chugs along fairly poorly on my computer… but it does work. You can click on a title, have more information display, and even get more details. All very good ideas, although their interface is a little disjunctive, and Im pretty sure my computer hates having two or three different flash widgets up.

Visualization and rendering are VERY important. Even Edward Tufte thinks so.