In 2006, some guys at the Simile project at MIT (especially D. F. Huynh) introduced an AJAX tool called timeline, which visualizes timelines, i.e. events in their chronological order. When I started this blog, I thought about adding some timeline visualization for my blog entries, ideally in form of some wordpress plugin. Well, I probably won’t write any timeline plugin for wordpress, as I found one today that uses the above mentioned tool: the wordpress simile plugin.
I have downloaded it and this is the result, without any further editing:
I need to adjust it a bit in the next days, but shouldn’t be difficult to get it modified.
At the end of the day, I would like to embed the timeline into the design template for this blog, for example at the top, where the search is currently located.
I consider this kind of timeline as a very useful technology, as long as it can be used by as many people as possible. This means that using it in your own website must be very easy. The data retrieval is probably the big problem. To have a tool like this widely adopted, anyone must be able to extract data from a blog, from wikipedia, google, any of the big names in the internet etc.
I’ll investigate the possibilities in more detail during the next weeks.