The Dandelife Blog

An open invitation to friends who would like to help me build this site. (File under: Half-bakery.)

The basic problem that I’m trying to solve is one that a lot of people have. Namely, they don’t keep a diary. And even if they did, it would only be a record of ideas. This site would help people map their life’s experiences and then to relate those experiences to others. I call it “The Wall of Memories” because it’s where one would go to continually create the graffiti that is their life’s experiences continuously adding photos, stories, and people to their complex and utterly unique path through life.

I have no idea how you could make money off of this site. But I’m thinking you could simply sell subscriptions. I would gladly pay $50/year for a place that helped me organize and share my life’s experiences with others. As more people join, the more the services has value. The last thing the world needs is another social networking site, so this site would benefit from partnering with, instead of duplicating, the efforts of another social networking site.

What do you think? You up for the challenge? I have a lot on my plate now, but I’d put in the extra hours at night and on the weekends to get it off the ground. I can even run around raising money if I had a good management team aboard. If resources are an issue, that is.

Link: The Wall of Memories - a photoset on Flickr

I’ve story boarded the concept on my dry erase boards and then photographed them and then added comments to them in my flickr set.

18 Tips for squashing writer’s block. The web-inclined writer may enjoy tip # 13 - “unplug the router”. Everything else is your standard fare. “Write the middle,” “write from a persona,” “listen to new music,” “take a walk,” and “write crap”. I would add “write the critical notice” and “cook a large dinner with whatever you have in the house”.

Link: 43 Folders: Hack your way out of writer’s block

“Fraser Speirs rocks me lock a hurricane.”

You won’t hear me say that in mixed company. But you will hear me talk about how nice it is — finally — to yield completely to the temptation of letting iPhoto rule my image library.

Recently I discovered the wonderful world of photo file sharing offered up by flickr.com. Here’s what I have posted for all to see. There are a number of great details that the nerdist in me would love to point out. All those details add up to is one big fact: flickr lets you keep your photos online and share them however you want. Simple.

Before flickr I was in the habit of posting my photos using the photoshop and fireworks batch processing scripts. But those were static. Flickr is, in the parlance of everyday dot-commists, dy-nam-ic. I can syndicate my photos. I can upload my photos to my blog. I can email my photos to flickr. And now, I can organize and upload them using iPhoto.

And they say bliss is ignorance.

Link: Fraser Speir’s Flickr Export for iPhoto.
Link: My flickr profile.

And if you look down below you can find some photos I’ve recently mailed and syndicated here.

For those of us who subscribe to the Factcheck.org newsletters, the 2004 campaign ending signaled a retreat not only of political rhetoric in our everyday lives, but a retreat of its nearest cure - the factcheck.org reports. Today subscribers were asked to fill out a survey answering questions like “Were the newsletters helpful?” and “Did you forward them?” Normally, I wouldn’t take the time to fill out a survey. Normally I wouldn’t take the time to blog the fact that I took a survey. Normally, when given the chance to write-in my thoughts on what can be improved in an already invaluable service, I wouldn’t be capable of the task. However today, I did. All of the above. It ended with the following:

“It would be good to have a kind of rating scale for the degree and types of inaccuracies on which you’re reporting. Then perhaps an ongoing tally of of these ratings. Quantifying qualitative matters can be difficult — and a lie is a lie — but as long as you’re in the business of parsing the truth, you may as well set it on a scale, no?”

“So the wrong candidate has won, and you want to leave the country. Let us consider your options. ”

From Electing to Leave at Harpers.org