Shortly after posting about timeline tools for info presentation on the web, I came across another tool, My Timelines. This timeline tool is based on SIMILE Timeline, so it can be embedded into any website or blog platform. It's similar to the Freshlabs SIMILE Timeline WordPress plugin in that it creates a river of news. But the difference with My Timelines is that you supply an RSS feed (or Atom or RDF) and it produces the timeline from the items. This is a much nicer way to scan a niche's headlines.

Process

Here's the general process for building a niche monitor using timelines:

1. Pick the blogs/ sites that you want to monitor.
2. Mash up the feed set into a superfeed.
3. Burn the superfeed's URL at Feedburner. (See reason below, under Superfeed.)
4. Use My Timelines to build a river of news with the Feedburner superfeed.

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In the quest to build comprehensive content for blogs and websites in general, I've been looking at ways that I can present mass amounts of information and still make it all accessible online for the average reader. One such way is to use a timeline tool, if your information/ data has a time component. This is something I mentioned in 28 Ways to Use WordPress Custom Fields, where one example mentioned SIMILE Timeline, an AJAX-y web tool for showing historical information/ temporal data.

This is not one of my WordPress Hacks examples. Timelines can be used on any website CMS or blog platform. A quick search on Google will show you that timeline tools are increasing in supply, though they are probably quite underused except by serious researchers.

Why Use Timeline Tools?

Here are some benefits of using web-based timeline tools to present temporal data:

1. Visually accessible means of presenting historically-related information.
2. Present multiple timelines/ event clusters simultaneously.
3. Present text, links, images and digital media per event (depending on the tool used).
4. User interactivity with events.

Uses of Timeline Tools

These are just a few generic and specific uses of timelines.

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