Mumbai Attacks: A Video Timeline

Source: Mashable

I haven't posted much about the Mumbai attacks because I don't really know where to start or where to end. The best I can present to you in this timeline. Press "View in Dipity" to go the the website and see the timeline in full

The horrendous attacks in Mumbai, while covered extensively by mainstream news outlets, have also been credited as another landmark moment for social media sites like Twitter, Flickr and YouTube. CNN called the Mumbai attacks Twitter’s “coming of age“, while one Flickr photoset has received in excess of 70,000 views.

How to make sense of the outpouring of social media from Mumbai? Social timeline Dipity has just served up a particularly useful account tracking how events unfolded, pulling together news stories and YouTube videos and posting them along a timeline (embedded above).

Some things to try while playing with the above widget:

1. In Timeline View, click on the first bubble, then continue hitting “next event” for the easiest navigation.

2. Hit the Flipbook View, then click on the far right of the timeline to flick through the events of the most recent attack (the Mumbai timeline goes right back to 2001)

3. Click List View for the simplest representation of the data - a list of the videos in reverse chronological order

4. Click Map View to see videos plotted on a map (largely useless in the Mumbai case, but a good Dipity feature)

Dipity is imperfect, for sure: you can quickly lose your place while navigating the timeline. And yet, there is so much social media content created during world events that new ways to view and navigate that data are becoming invaluable. Perhaps even more telling: use cases like these are helping social media to shake off its stigma of being a tool for narcissists or a wasteland filled with life’s minutiae.