Following in the footsteps of Storify, a new free, open-source online timeline tool is innovating storytelling on the web.

Timeline, created by Zach Wise, a multimedia journalist and journalism professor, was developed in partnership with the Knight News Innovation Lab at Northwestern University, where Wise teaches. The interactive tool allows users to generate timelines on the web by curating content fromTwitter, YouTube, Flickr, Vimeo, Google Maps and SoundCloud.

“The tools that already exist on the web are almost all either hard on the eyes or hard to use,” said Wise. “Timeline is an open-source, JavaScript and HTML/HTML 5 based tool that creates elegant timelines.”

Audiences can see the “elegance” Wise is referring to with the examples the folks behind Timeline have created to illustrate its potential… While Timeline is similar to Storify in that it allows users to aggregate media on the web, it differs in its operation. With Storify, users can drag and drop content into a post. With Timeline, users can either embed the code onto their website using JSON, or — if they don’t want to mess with any coding — they can fill in a ready-made Timeline template on Google Docs. The project is currently hosted on GitHub, and users can find specific directions on how to both embed the code and use the Google Doc template there, too.” Source: Mashable