Displaying time and timezone information to the user (what, not how)

Question

(This is a question about the UI rather than the technology required to do it)

What is the clearest way to display a time for events occurring in different timezones to a user? Does your "average" user understand UTC and timezones?

We capture the local time and UTC offset and store it in the database (SQL 2008 DateTimeOffset) for events happening in different timezones. Users are also in a variety of timezones.

I'll suggest a couple of answers below so they can be rated but I'd appreciate alternative suggestions.

EDIT: I'd like to avoid displaying the time in the user's timezone. Users in different timezones will be discussing the same events and if they're local to different timezones, there'll be confusion.

EDIT: I wanted to make the question generic and hopefully useful to more people but for some specific context, this is a web application for tracking parcels (think FedEx). Parcels will cross timezones. Customer support is in the UK but the recipient may be elsewhere.

Answer 1

Try an old-style newsroom graphic, where you have clocks labeled "New York", "London", "Tokyo" and then "Papua, New Guinea" or wherever your particular viewer is located. You can make the clocks analog or digital or both.

No one will be confused by this, whereas I don't think most people really know what GMT+7 (or whatever) means.