Dipity, Or, How to View Time, 2.0

July 7, 2008

For history buffs like me, a rich understanding of the temporal structure of the world is very important, almost more so than its spatial structure. Timelines to me are in some ways vastly more interesting than atlases and maps. More generally, I (like I suspect, many others), have been watching jealously while creative programmers have been making up great “2.0″ style visualizations, and wishing I could use their tools. Today, a startup named Dipity made my day by creating a fantastic time-line visualization tool, which I used to create this visualization of the history of my employer, Xerox. I absolutely love it when a company does just one thing, but does it really well. Wikinomics.com has a great interview with the co-founder, Derek Dukes. I hope this is the start of a whole new ecosystem of startups that creates a riot of visualization tools for everybody to use. Next request: somebody create a tool for user-generated cartograms please.

[Visualization here; temporarily un-embedded]

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Posted in Business, Technology, Thinking