NYT Woodstock Interactive Feature

Although it´s a little old, this multimedia special on Woodstock is pretty cool. The structure is straightforward: after a breif text introduction (with a hyperlink to the Art Beat blog), it lays out boxes with the audio, informative text, and an occasional hyperlink. These boxes are organized by band, making the structure super easy for a user to follow. Its formats are fairly basic in that it only uses text, hypertext and audio (plus one tiny photo). It also lacks features, like timelines, maps, or infographics. But it makes up for these shortcomings in that its extremely interactive and user oriented: users are encouraged to stream a sampling of songs from Woodstock, vote on them, and share their thoughts on New York Times´"Art Beat" blog. Aside from commenting on the blog, NYT encourages the use of social media with this multimedia special in that they allow you to sign in with your NYT account to email the post or reccommend it to other users, tweet it on Twitter, or share it on Facebook, Linked In, MySpace, Mixx, Digg, or Yahoo! Buzz. Although the content hasn´t been updated since its publication on August 10th, the tallies of the votes (which you can see by clicking on one of the "vote" buttons) are updated in real time.



But to prove that not all multimedia presentations are equal, take a look at this other multimedia presentation about Woodstock. While it lacks the social media options provided by the multimedia presentation by the New York Times, it combines video (divided into sections based on the idea behind Woodstock, each day of the festival, and its aftermath) with audio, links, text, and an "infographic" timeline. The sidebar includes "related content" , which often pops up with information about the song that is currently accompanying the video. These things all combine to make for easy navigability for the user. At the same time, the video plays automatically and while the "related content" offers a lot of options for the user to interact with the piece, they aren´t forced to do so as they are with the New York Times presentation, which ultimately leaves the user with less control.