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meograph

Some great updates from Meograph

Earlier this month we told you about Meograph, the “four-dimensional storytelling” engine, and they’ve been hard at work improving the system.

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The new features include:
• Playback Control: Pause, rewind, and forward your way through a meograph.
• Google Maps: You now have the ability to view the meograph on Google Maps for those who don’t want to or can’t install the GE plug-in.
• No Excel: Previously, you needed to upload an Excel spreadsheet to create your meograph. That is no more, as things are beginning to smooth out.
• More context button: Allows you to quickly dig into more detail at any moment during the playback.
There is still more work to do, but it seems to be coming along quite nicely. Check it out for yourself at meograph.com.

Meograph’s “four-dimension storytelling” demo goes live

While I was at Where 2012 last month, I sat down with Misha Leybovich to discuss a new product he was working on called Meograph. At the time there wasn’t anything to show, but they’ve just launched their first demo and it’s looking quite impressive.
They call it “Four-dimensional storytelling”, adding geospatial information to go along with photos, audio, video and text. The result is a very compelling way to share a story, as seen here in this screenshot from the Whitney Houston demo.

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While you can’t yet create your own meographs on the system, that ability is coming soon. They’re hoping to open it up for registration sometime this summer, though journalists can request alpha access right now by emailing journalism@meograph.com. Ultimately it will be a great tool for telling stories about the news, which can be embedded on your own site. It reminds me a bit of the Google Earth Diorama, in that it gives you an easy way to embed other media into the Google Earth Plug-in.
At this point it appears that Meograph will be a bit easier to use, while Diorama will be more powerful. However, both products are still being developed and it’ll be interesting to see how they progress.
You can explore the Meograph demo site at meograph.com/demo.