An evening paper in North Wales has used the latest technology to help UFO spotters follow a series of sightings in the region.

The Evening Leader has used a third-party website to create a record of the sightings on a timeline and map which are now embedded in its own site.

Many residents in the area have reported seeing mysterious lights above their homes and the Leader has carried a series of stories about them.

The third-party site, www.dipity.com, has allowed the Flintshire and Cheshire-based title to collate the growing number of articles in timeline and Google map form, with links back to the stories as they originally appeared on the paper’s own site.

The Leader’s digital editor Christian Dunn said: “I only came across www.dipity.com a few days ago, but straight away we’ve found a use for it.

“It saves quite a bit of time because we wanted to create both an ongoing timeline of our UFO sightings and a spotters map for the area. Dipity allows you to do both of these at the same time.

“We turned the whole thing into a widget and embed this onto our site, and by making our UFO spotting ‘topic’ public on Dipity other users of the site can find it, which helps drive traffic to eveningleader.co.uk.

“We’ll definitely be looking at what else we can use Dipity for in the future as our sites don’t let us create such good visual timelines – which can be a great way to illustrate how a story has developed.”

Barrie Jones, editor in chief of NWN Media Ltd, publishers of the Evening Leader and www.eveningleader.co.uk, said: “We’ve had a flood of UFO sightings across our region lately and they are always very popular stories, both in the newspaper and online.

“We are always trying develop intuitive ways of presenting the news on our websites and geotagging stories and plotting them on timelines in Dipity is an excellent way of doing this.”

Deputy editor Martin Wright added: “Our UFO spotters map is another way that we’re trying to improve the user experience of our websites – ensuring that we are not simply replicating our newspaper online, but giving our online readers something different that they can’t get in our printed products.”

The UFO spotters map can be found here.

Comments

JD (13/10/2008 12:33:51)
Niche, but a nice curiosity piece. The punter DO love their unknown. A cheap win that’ll bring in the visitors (hopefully only terrestrial). Nice one