thismoment

I've been experimenting with a site called thismoment and finding it quite appealing. The central idea is that you capture significant moments of your life on a timeline and describe them using text, photos, videos and links. You can draw on photos that you have on Flickr and Picasa and can post to Facebook and Twitter. Friends can be nominated so that they too can add content to the various moments.

Educationally, it has possibilities because it could allow students to document the development of a project. Your typical blog provides this facility too but the interface of thismoment makes navigation and collaboration a lot easier. The site clearly has bugs. For example, my entry of June 27th still remains in the future on the timeline, even though it's now June 28th. Another problem is that even though you can specify your location, the site remains insensitive to that and regards now as being now somewhere in the United States.

Furthermore, by use of custom labels, you can use an existing account to view only those moments that have been given a certain label. Students working on a project could simply use the label "project" when making contributions (moments). They can still create other moments but when the filter "projects is chosen then only those moments with that label will appear on the timeline. I'm currently investigating another site called posterous and will report on that shortly.