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Following in the footsteps of Storify, a new free, open-source online timeline tool is innovating storytelling on the web.

Timeline, created by Zach Wise, a multimedia journalist and journalism professor, was developed in partnership with the Knight News Innovation Lab at Northwestern University, where Wise teaches. The interactive tool allows users to generate timelines on the web by curating content from Twitter, YouTube, Flickr, Vimeo, Google Maps and SoundCloud.

“The tools that already exist on the web are almost all either hard on the eyes or hard to use,” said Wise. “Timeline is an open-source, JavaScript and HTML/HTML 5 based tool that creates elegant timelines.”

Audiences can see the “elegance” Wise is referring to with the examples the folks behind Timeline have created to illustrate its potential. A timeline on the life of Whitney Houston features several YouTube videos, for instance — an ideal form of storytelling for a performer. Another timeline on the Republican presidential campaign not only features YouTube videos, but also Flickr photos from the primaries and quotations from news articles.

With the timeline, a specific date, its description and any media (if any) associated with it fills the upper two-thirds of the browser. Meanwhile, the bottom third of the browser shows how that item fits in categorically within the larger subject of the timeline. So audiences can concentrate on one specific date and navigate to another specific date, all while still being able to see how these moments fit in within the larger timespan.

While Timeline is similar to Storify in that it allows users to aggregate media on the web, it differs in its operation. With Storify, users can drag and drop content into a post. With Timeline, users can either embed the code onto their website using JSON, or — if they don’t want to mess with any coding — they can fill in a ready-made Timeline template on Google Docs. The project is currently hosted on GitHub, and users can find specific directions on how to both embed the code and use the Google Doc template there, too.

Future plans for the project include support of more media type, as well as iPhone compatibility, B.C. time support and better seconds and milliseconds support.

What do you think of this new timeline tool? Do you think you’ll use it for any projects? Let us know in the comments.

More About: new media, open source

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So what’s the future of news? A Local Wiki platform that allows citizens to easily maintain news about their community? A tool for that would allow news organizations to create real-time ads? Or is it mapped news integrated with social sites? These are just a few of the examples that were named winners of the The Knight Foundation News Challenge today at the Future of News Conference at MIT.

The Challenge awarded 12 winners $2.74 million in grants who submitted innovative open-source, digital pitches that can create better “informed and engaged communities.” Though many of winners included elements of social media, perhaps some of the most interesting ideas are ones that attempt to solve some of the business model problems of journalism, including NowSpots, which enables news organizations to create and sell real-time ads and PRX StoryMarket, which is partnering with Spot.us to allow “anyone to pitch and help pay to produce a story.”

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Real-Time Ads With NowSpots

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The Pitch: “To create software that allows news sites to generate revenue from a new kind of ad.”

The project is being led by Brad Flora, the founder of the WindyCitizen, who has tested the concept of real-time ads on his site by creating a widget that features a business’s social updates (i.e. Twitter and Facebook updates). The project would scale this idea to other news organizations that want to integrate it into their sites.

“Display ads suck,” Flora said in his acceptance of the News Challenge Award. “It’s hard to make money with online banner ads.” Flora explained that although small business have not really taken advantage of banner ads or online ads in general, they have jumped to create a social presence with Facebook Pages, Twitter accounts and more. Real-time ads meet them halfway, he said.

What is clever about this idea is that the ads function as a paid social widget that refreshes each time a business updates its status. It’s also interactive, so that users can click to follow the business or retweet or reshare that update, which makes the ads feel different from the traditional banner ads we are used to. Because social updates are not all about promotion, the ads have the potential to add more value.

However, the site could have some competition in getting publishers to use their platform over that of Minnpost.com, which is already selling Real Time Ads on its site and plans to offer it to other publishers for use.

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Crowd-funding With PRX StoryMarket

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Pitch: “To take the software from Spot.us and adapt it for public radio.”

Public Radio Exchange is going to take the crowd-funding idea of Spot.us and extend it to public radio stations, enabling loyal listeners — many of whom are already supporting the station — to fund local content by donating to stories that they find important.

With Spot.us, readers see pitches for stories from freelance journalists and are able to fund the cost of that story by contributing. This project will extend the crowd-funding idea to a medium, and one that is already thriving through user donations.

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Reporting Using Social Media With One-Eight

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Pitch: “To interactively chronicle the new uses of social networks by the military.”

Afghanistan recently passed Vietnam as the longest American war. At that time, T.V. was the medium that is often credited with informing the public, which eventually resulted in its end.

Because the Department of Defense opened social media use to soldiers, social media has the potential to be the new media that results in the end of this war, said Teru Kuwayama, the award winner of $202,000 for One-Eight, which will document a Marine battalion in Afghanistan by combining reporting with the Marine’s own use of social updates.

You can see the full list of News Challenge winners here or view the video with a 10-second pitch from each winner. What do you think of these ideas?

Image Courtesy of Knight Foundation.

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The top stories in the mainstream press are markedly different than those that lead on social media platforms, a recent study by the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism revealed.

Furthermore, what is popular on one social network rarely proves popular on another. In the 29 weeks that the Center tracked news items on blogs, TwitterTwitter and YouTubeYouTube, the three platforms only shared the same top story once — the week of June 15-19, 2009, when Iranian citizens flocked to the streets to contest the results of the presidential election.

Let’s take a look at what was popular on the different social networking sites and how that compares to what gained traction with traditional news media in 2009.

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Blogs

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Of the three social media platforms examined, news-oriented blogs and mainstream media have the greatest overlap. Bloggers tend to credit traditional news outlets for their information and focus on the same topics, mainly political and international news. Even so, the two had the same top story for a mere 13 of the 49 weeks they were evaluated together.

Although blogs cover many of the same topics, the study found that bloggers tend to focus on more ideological and emotional stories — particularly those concerning human rights, like access to healthcare services or privacy on Facebook — and often with a personal or partisan angle. Bloggers also like to make a story out of “off-beat” or “buried” items in mainstream media coverage.

Although bloggers often attribute their material to the mainstream press, this rarely happened in the reverse. Over the course of the year, the study found only one story that the mainstream media picked up from the blogosphere: a story based on a number of controversial e-mails about climate research dubbed “Climate-gate”.

Because bloggers are so largely dependent on the mainstream media for their information — more than 99% of the stories cited in blogs linked to the websites of traditional news outlets — it will be interesting to see what will happen once major sources like The New York Times and The Times go behind paywalls. Where will bloggers get their information? Will they be as likely to link to stories if they are behind paywalls? How dramatically will that hurt referral traffic to traditional news sites?

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Twitter

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Compared to the blogosphere, Twitter’s community uses the platform more for sharing important breaking news items than for personal or political discussion, a method shaped both by the 140-character word limit — which does not allow for lengthy reflections — the service imposes, and because it is able to disseminate information through lists of followers quickly.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, technology was far and away the most popular new topic on Twitter in 2009; of all the news stories shared or discussed on the platform, 43% were focused on technology. Technology makes up a marginal 1% of news coverage at mainstream outlets and 8% of blogs. Notably, few Twitter users appear to be interested in economic news; 1% of all news tweets were about the economy, compared to 10% of articles in the traditional press and 7% posts on blogs.

Although technology is the Twitter community’s primary interest by and large, the top news subject in the latter half of 2009 was the aftermath of the Iranian election results. It remained the top news story on Twitter for seven straight weeks, much longer than on any other platform. Collectively, Twitter was more concerned with foreign events than the blogosphere and the traditional press, likely because its userbase is much more international.

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YouTube

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Like Twitter, YouTube is more of a platform to share and curate important information than a forum for lengthy discussions, although viewers are often active in the comments. Because videos take a long time to edit and upload, there is less of an emphasis on breaking news than on Twitter.

What’s unique about YouTube is that its focus on politics and foreign events far surpasses that of any other platform. Of the news videos on YouTube, politics attracted 21% of views and international news attracted 26%, compared to 15% and 9% in the mainstream media, respectively. The study intelligently points out that this is because “videos transcend language barriers in a way written text cannot.”

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What This Means for Mainstream Media

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The study underlines the large disconnect between what mainstream media thinks is “top news” and what social media users consider newsworthy, as well as the different kinds of content and discussion each platform attracts.

It also suggests that if traditional news companies want to succeed online — that is, if they want to attract a large number of page views and be relevant to users on the web — they may need to alter their content to match readers’ interests.

What do you find most interesting about the study? What does it imply for the future of news media, both new and old?

[img credit: DRB62]

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