Post date: 23-Feb-2009 13:41:50
I've been thinking recently about creating a timeline of my life, a visualisation of people, places and events that have been significant to me. I decided to try and feed it using the data I have sprinkled around in various systems - events from Google Calendar, contacts from Gmail, pictures from Google Web Albums - and started searching for tools to tie them all together with.
MIT's Timeline immediately caught my eye. Part of their SIMILE visualisation project, Timeline provides a very slick data-driven DHTML toolkit for smoothly scrolling timelines - provide it a DIV and some JSON-formatted data and Timeline does the rest. (SIMILE also has some other great visualisation tools - check out Timeplot or Exhibit for more examples.)
jsViz is also pertinent, although I'm less certain how I'll use it. This last.fm mashup certainly grabbed my interest, though.
This is an ongoing experiment, so I'll be updating as I explore the possibilities. Ultimately, I'd love for this to end up as a web service - feed it your syndicated life data and scroll through a visualisation of your life...