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I wrote a version of this tonight to the editor at iStockphoto.com. I decided it was too decent to leave private. I’m hoping that other editors and journalists will find a nugget or two worth their time as well.

Every time I’m in a bar, or out at dinner with friends, or talking to my relatives about things I’d done this past year, the stories flow effortlessly. I can tell a story about when I got food poisoning in Stockholm and that will prompt a story from someone who remembers backpacking in Europe which will spark yet another story from yet another person about what makes a great backpack. Next thing you know, you’ve thrown back a pint or two, killed a few hours effortlessly and have rewarded your memories by invoking them and having a laugh with like minds - now if you’d only had a camera rolling so you could save those stories later.

I think of Laurie Anderson’s adage all the time: “technology is the fire around which we tell our stories.” That ‘technology’could be happy hour watching games and drinking beers in front of the bigscreen, on the phone with my Aunt and Uncle’s at Christmastime, in the waiting room at the Doctor’s office just killing time, or a campsite, under the stars, where there is nothing else to do but eat, drink and relive the past. Dandelife is a small campfire around which you can tell your story.
How I think Dandelife appeals to the storytellers is that I’m cultivating good storytellers here who as a community can share good words, have thought-proviking and stimulating discourse and ultimately create a niche for their pasts as individuals and also as a community - thus rewarding themselves foor having had a good life and lived to tell it in an interesting way.

I just see the same kind of creative energy in the blogospher that I hope to have at Dandelife - only with blogs, the topics are topics and almost always told out of context. Having a blog about your past is like keeping a diary - sharing it is almost sad, really. But talking about your past in the context of stories told by others is just plain old yarn-spinning fun. Very creative storytellers who’ve led very interesting lives are worth building a site for. I’m bringing writers online so that they may invoke the bars, the trains, the roads, the living rooms, the studios and the campfires that warrant posterity.

Every time I tell people who know me that I’ve quit my job so that I can create a site where people come to tell their stories, share the past and reminisce, it makes sense to them that it would be me. I love writing. I love good writing. I love non-fiction the most. I love documentaries. A good night out always involves copious amounts of bullshitting. That’s why I travel. That’s why I chat and blog and email. To spread the good word.
So that’s my story. It’d be great if you could help me spread the good word, too.

Rewarding Users for Contributing Data

This radar posting reminds me that I need to re-read Peer-to-Peer, edited by Andy Oram. I just grabbed my copy off the shelf and opened up to the second chapter: Listening to Napster, by Clay Shirky. In it he writes:

• “It’s the application, stupid.” That is, Napster existed so as to solve a problem. The application was, from the very beginning, a solution to a common problem.
• “Decentralization is a tool, not a goal.” Which is to say, the means should be seen as a way to the end.
• Later on, Shirky writes about how “PC’s are the dark matter of the Internet.” Seems a quaint notion nowadays simply because Clay was spot on. What he was getting at was the fact that ASP’s faced a disruptive challenge posed by individuals and their PC’s. Individuals and their PC’s are where the content comes from. Not central sources.

With Dandelife, I see echos of Clay’s musings on the matter. Dandelife was invented in order to provide a service that I needed. I kept forgetting events from my past that were important to me. I knew they were there, but I needed help jogging those memories. When reminiscing over a few beers with friends, all that was previous lost suddenly came back to me - not just little bits at a time, but waves; something in what we were doing around the proverbial campfire was helping my past render itself vividly. We’d laugh, share stories, and continue until the wee hours only to have forgotten most of the events that I’d conjured up the previous evening. Weeks go by. Have another get-together, and whoosh here come the memories. New ones this time. It gets to be wher friends, and their stories, I noticed, made the act of recalling what had happened in my life easier to remember. I’d come to count on it.
Besides solving a problem for me and others, I don’t see dandelife as anything more than a tool at the end of the day. I think some will be drawn into its social networking possibilities, yes, and leave it at that. I hope those people come. And I hope they stay. If they stay it will be for one reason and one reason alone: social networks, like peer-to-peer networks exist are perpetuated by selfishness (another tenet brought up later in the book). Napster thrived for as long as it did because the act of sharing actually produced better results when you needed to mooch. That’s an ideal P2P model. In dandelife, the social network exists so that it will jog my memory. I am selfishly motivated to return to dandelife and read other people’s stories so that I may be reminded of an event would have otherwise been left in the vast abyss of my own gray matter. While Dandelife.com may indeed become an entertaining place to visit from time to time, it is much more rewarding if visited often and for ulterior motives. What’s more, as you begin to jog your memory and write more, you begin to jog the memories of others more. Call it D2D - Dandelife-to-Dandelife. D2D a virtuous cycle when it’s played selfishly round and round. Call it P2P or social networking, it adds up to the same result: D2D is a dish best served hungry.
As a parting note tonight, Dan Bricklin wrote chapter four and titled it, The Cornucopia of the Commons. In it he heeded the call of the commons which at its heart has a tragic potential: all people strive for more share of that which is commonly available. Think land, air, water, money - and yes, there’s scarcity to be had. No amount of sharing will generate more land. But in Dandelife, there’s a cornucopia of commons for sure. It starts with sharing one story and ends where there are no more stories to share. Is there such a place, where stories cease to exist?

Steph and I took the mini out for a spin this weekend. Met her folks at their Campround outside of Julian and went wine-tasting. I put together this video with the ultimate in mobile nerd technoloogy. Shot entirely on my treao 700, for one. For two, mixed entirely on the web. Check out the finished product at JumpCut.

What I like about this format is that it doesn’t expect much by way of refinement. It liberates me to just get my material published.  So much for quality, but then again, the sketch itself will suffice to retain the memory. Which is exactly what I’d expect of my dandelife too.

Guardian Unlimited Books | News | Guardian writer wins Ondaatje prize for Russian civil war novel
The £10,000 Ondaatje prize is now in its third year and recognises “the book of the highest literary merit - fiction or non fiction - that evokes the spirit of a place.”

Stephanie and Kelly’s 2005 Year-End Holiday Card

Last year I had my prototype version of Dandelife up for a little over 6 months. Using flickr as a basis for creating the events that filled my dandelife from that year I was able to back-fill the other 5 or so months that were missing from the year. What I ended up with was the attached; a PDF we made with photos and stories from the year all wrapped up into a nice holiday card we were able to send to all of our friends, extended family and, well, any stranger at the bus stop. I’m hoping that by the end of the year, Dandelife is able to provide some kind of year-at-a-glance service, print-on-demand card for these kinds of cheesy cards. Without it, cards tend to be less about what you did in teh year and more about just getting out a heartfelt season greeting. One is good, but why not do both if you have the chance?

I wrote this personal essay a while back when I thought my idea was good enough to get me in to E-Tech for free. It explains in detail another goal of mine with Dandelife. The awkward feeling of reconnecting with someone after years of having been separated. This person is someone you used to call a friend. But time and circumstance have driven you two apart over the years. How do you convey what you’be been doing for the past N years? Show him/her your dandelife. If Dandelife has any test to pass, it’s this test. I call it “The Kirk Test.” It’s named after Kirk Dietrich, a friend who re-connected with me last fall and who was actually be interested in the past 17 years since I’ve lived in Cleveland and we were best friends. Who else would be?

(more…)

That’s what I call it. In the process of creating Dandelife people have naturally asked me what Dandelife is all about. I’ve struggled with the elevator pitch because on the surface it sounds icredible lame. The responses varied but essentially all said the same thing:

“Dandelife is a place where you can record all of the things you’ve done, all the places you’ve been and all the people you’ve met.”

But before that, the dandelife pitch was considerably more contrived. Try these on for size.

• Dandelife is a social network (sic!) where people have a different way of blogging (sic!) where they can create their own biographies (sic!) and share them with people online.
• Dandelife is a place where people can escape myspace. [I actually liked that one, although it is a bit boastful for most people’s taste. Putting oneself in the breath of myspace invites too much undue skepticism.]
• Dandelife is a place where you can write your own personal biography. [True but boring.]
• Dandelife: the humanpedia. [i.e. Wikipedia for average people, places and things.]
• Dandelife: the fire around which we tell our stories. [Too, I don’t know, schmaltzy.]

I don’t really try to explain dandelife so much. Instead I like to show them. This usually happens when I’m out and about and I don’t have a computer, all I have is my Treo. So I pull up my phone, I take a picture of the person, I send it to flickr. Then I go to dandelife.com and show them how I can create a story from that photo. I show how it timestamps the story with the picture’s date and time. I give it a title “Showing [insert name] how Dandelife works. How I can type in some scant details and tag it. And save it. Then I show them how that story shows up in my timeline as the last thing I did.

“Cool phone,” is the usual response. And after that, “What do you call this?”

“Dandelife-dot-com.”

At some point you get people who are know-it-alls and this short demo does not impress them. Nevertheless, they know about myspace, they know about ophoto, they know about yahoo360 and multiply and friendster and linkdin. They may even know about iKarma - a new linkedin competitor - and wonder out loud how Dandelife is different. And I say because I don’t want to rule the world.

That’s right, I don’t want to rule the world. This site isn’t about being the biggest, the cheapest, the sexiest or the fastest. It’s just about time.
I dreamed up Dandelife because I was having trouble lifecasting. That is, I was blogging, I was on Friendster, and I’ve been using linkedin. Somehow none of those efforts really saved for posterity the me that my friends and family know best. Blogging was great for getting out ideas and into a place where I had to defend them. Friendster was great for keeping in touch with old friends (I never used it to meet others; I’m just not that lonely I guess.) Linkedin was and still remains a great place for me to meet business contacts and keep contact information up to date. MySpace always seemed so aesthetically unrewarding - a prerequisite for MySpace seems to be pretending to be someone you’re not.

None of those experiences sufficed. So dandelife is a response to that. That’s why it’s free of google adwords. That’s why I’m not going to charge fees for making your lifecast visible to anyone you want. That’s why the Dandelife default creative commons copyrights encourage sharing. That’s why the site works in Firefox and Safari and is built on Rails and has all that AJAXy goodness. Because those are all things I love.

So when provoked - or given enough to drink - and someone asks me what Dandelife is all about, I might say, “It’s lifecasting. Yours, mine, and anyone else you want to share your life with online. Past ain’t prologue, it’s everthing. Life is beta. You’re constantly improving why not take notes? Don’t get me started.”

I put this vlog together after watching the Tiger Woods interviews on 60 Minutes. I recorded it using a Mac iSight video capture software from Germany called iVeZeen. Then I uploaded it to Youtube. It’s a recount of one of my fondest sports memories. I was tending bar in Columbus during college the year Tiger went pro and blew away the Masters. It’s such a vivid memory of mine that it only made sense to record it for posterity. The video quality is low because I forgot to do something simple like put a light in front of my face. But you’ll get the picture.