Last post, I briefly brought up Time Trails, a Wichita based internet start up developing a web app. Without divulging anything proprietary, I will try to describe how this app could turn out to be a phenomenal supplement to the traditional methods of learning history–reading and vegging out in front of the History Channel.
Like I said before, Time Trails will be a web app. And at first glance, it will look similar to Google Earth. (It will run off of Google Earth’s platform.) (By the way, I just discovered Google Mars/Moon. Ridiculously cool.) Ok, sorry about the brief tangent. Getting back on track, Time Trails will be an amalgamation of Google Earth, Wikipedia, and Bing. It will be a community-maintained wiki that can also suggest products, resources, arts, culture, and whatever else from a particular place in time.
Continuing, the main idea behind Time Trails is to visually display when, where, why, and how history occurred. Want to track Livingston’s journey through Africa; or watch the Japanese engulf Indochina and the Philippines in the first years of WWII; or observe the expansion of the Roman Empire? Maybe not you, but the history nerd in me sure as hell wants to. And perhaps students across the world needing help with a history project might want to use it too–kinda like how Wikipedia started. The hours I could waste consuming the ultimate info-graphic…
The most unique aspect of Time Trails is throwing time into the whole satellite map equation. By way of a “time slider” you can change the year on the globe and literally play it and watch events unfold. I hope that didn’t sound like complete jibberish; the drawback of written communication: no hand gestures.
Full disclosure: I now work for Time Trails.
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Hello from Russia!
Can I quote a post in your blog with the link to you?