I thought the MIT SIMILE project’s Timeline script would be useful for watching weblog reactions to events, and lo, Zidane loses his temper during the second overtime of the World Cup final. So how do weblog authors react to his red card?
I grabbed an RSS feed of posts tagged ‘zidane’ from Technorati, transformed the feed into the Timeline XML format, and hooked up a page with the result:
As you see, there’s a burst of posts with the tag at the end of the 2nd overtime period.
It’s a shame he turned on the Italian player. But hey, bravo Italy, and on to 2010 in South Africa.
ETA: Demonstrating this has become an internet thing, Anil Dash collected all the Zidane headbutt animations.
ETA 2: Bill Lazar alerted me that the Timeline did not work in Firefox. The first thing it does is parse the URL so it can load the rest of the library using the write additional script elements to the DOM trick, but was failing. I’m looking for a workaround.
ETA 3: Fixed. Timeline needs to be the first script loaded. Loading Mint first confuses its bootstrap loader when run in Firefox.
3 Comments
The Timeline page is throwing an error:
“Failed to derive URL prefix for Timeline API code files.”
I wanted to post this to SportsFilter…
Ack. I’ll go see what’s the matter.
It seems to be working now.
MIT would like us to use the Coral net to proxy requests to the script, but it appears to be down.