Build your own timeline

One of the great things I like in some magazines is their ability to craft beautiful and interesting timeline tables. The tables of historical events and theirs correlations allow everyone to have a visual and immediate understanding of current affairs and history.
I just came across two fascinating start-ups that launched web 2.0 timeline tools. Using either http://www.xtimeline.com or http://www.allofme.com you have many ways to creatively use the timeline. You can start to create the Personal Timeline of your life from any digital assets you have, such as pictures, videos, blogs, documents, or any Internet page. You can them compare it with feature timelines (like the covers of Wired or Life magazines, of the history of the US, etc). The possibilities are endless, since these websites allow you to not only start any timeline you want but also to feed your content in existing timelines.
Timeline tools can be very interesting on public sector as well. It can become a great public service, a resource for accountability and for debate over current issues.  Imagine the ability to describe the history of a public initiative; of to track the way government addressed complex issues like any war, education reforms, climate change, ageing and demographics, child poverty, and other relevant topics. You can create timelines that incorporate analysis, use this as a tool to evaluate strategies. You can create timelines to compare almost anything. You can even encourage senior citizens to share their stories and enrich their communities.
Some public agencies have already their time lines available – for instance you can see the 60 years story of the UK’s National Heath Service here
But now you can create, share and discuss interesting timelines and create all sorts of correlations with other timelines of UK’s history and politics (PM’s, budgets, etc).
Rather than an official timeline, theses tools call for collaborative, wiki, open collaboration. You are empowered to be a testimony of history, as co-author of any timeline, since you create a timeline on a subject of your choice, and allow others to contribute to it as well. Choices include the ability to allow views, edits, or comments from "my friends," everyone, or the timeline creator alone. Timelines can be shared. Each timeline gets its own URL and both sites provide code for embedding. The layout for these timelines is clean, readable, and easy to navigate, which are all key functions to having a useful timeline on the Internet. The information for any given module on a timeline can be viewed along side the timeline, or as a full page, which has the formatting functionality of a blog entry. 
Here are some examples of interesting time lines, on Darfur crisis or on US involvment in the Mid-East 
Timeline 2.0 is still on it’s infancy, but as soon as these tools get the critical mass they need, it will became more relevant than ever.