The Dandelife Blog

What a roller-coaster it has been! Several thousand users joined the Dandelife community since launch. Together we have produced over 7,000 stories. Some are brief notes, some mark milestones, and some are captivating blasts from the past. All in all, everyone of them is a part of the fabric that makes Dandelife a unique place on the web. I hope we can inspire you to write more stories, connect with others, and give you an idle diversion from the routine. Please feel free to write to me directly if you have suggestions on how Dandelife can be improved. I honestly want to hear from you and will be happy to respond.

Stories of the week:

A Very Long Story About How I Got Such an Unfortunate Nickname, by The Benigma
Champaign Katie, by traciayer
Regret Not, by Oatsey
Nixon and the Blue Frog, by tomwatson
The Towels Floating in the Lake, by jgauntt
Clinical Death but God Brought me Back , by SkyDreams
Highway to Sell, by wade1j

Read them and vote on them. The more times a story is favorited, the higher its rank in Dandelife will be.

Did You Know?
Did you know that you can send stories to the people who are in them?

We’re working on the ability to write a story and send that story to the people who are characters in those stories at the same time. Until then, you can always copy the URL (the address that shows up in the address bar in your browser) and paste it into an email. That URL is a the permanent address for your story. Feel free to share it with anyone and everyone you think would like to read about your life and your stories.

For more tips, please watch the demos or visit our storyteller’s forum.

Tag: Flashbulb Memories

These are the memories that are burned into our memories by virtue of them being so powerful, we can hardly forget them at all. Flashbulb Memories can be shared memories - that is, memories that you share with thousands or millions of others, such as The Day Kennedy Was Shot, or When the Red Sox Won the World Series. Flashbulb memories can also be personal - such as a car accident or your first love (which sometimes feel like theyare one and the same).

We’ve been accumulating a list of events that almost all of us have experienced and are vividly etched in our minds in the forums. If you contrubute your own flashbulb memory, please add the following tags to them to that we can all share in the collective storytelling as well:

• Flashbulb memories
• Shared experiences

This week, let’s write some stories about Y2K.

New Features

• The connect page has changed. It now shows the most prolific members, the newest members and the most popular members.
• Green links. If you see a timeline that has green links in it, that means the member is online right now. If you post a comment or add a tag to his/her stories, chances are pretty good that you’ll get a response to your own stories soon too. Look for those green links and use them to make a friend quickly.
• Text size in the timelines. The more words you put in your stories, the larger the title of that story appears when it displays in the timeline. If you want to be seen by others, make sure you add more details to the stories you’re sharing. But remember: quality is generally better than quantity (despite of what Marx said).

Just FYI, you indicated that you wanted to be on the mailing list, but if you’d prefer not to receive these messages, please login to Dandelife.com, then modify your mail preferences in your account settings.

Thanks for your continued support! Keep on Dandelifing!

Thrive,
Kelly
CEO, Dandelife.com

The alpha period is now over. We have launched into a public beta. Come one, come all. Just don’t all come at once because I’m not sure the server could handle it.

Some highlights and new developments follow. If you’re the self-discovering type, then skip ahead to chapter 2 and have a look at the site now!

Link to the beta site.

Vanity Page - My vanity page is an at-a-glance view of my stories, photos, videos, tags, and comments. When you create your own Dandelife, your own vanity page will be the link you send around to your friends saying “Look at me! I’m lifecasting!”

Vertical Timeline and Quick Note functionality - ALL of my stories and tags in one long list. Organized by event date. There is also a Quick Note feature that allows you to quickly create a story without filling in all the details. By doing that you can quickly sketch out pieces of the story you want to tell without having to get all creative and stuff. I use it to rattle off ten or so memories in one go. Then I come back to it later when I have the desire to really do those stories justice.

Drag and drop Flickr photos and YouTube videos - You can add photos and videos to your story. They don’t even have to be photos or videos that you created. They just have to be public videos/photos in Flickr or Youtube.

Importing your blog content - Yes, you read that correctly. We know you’ve already told a bunch of good stories in your blog. Well Dandelife can help put this stories in context. We’ve created a fully-functional blog-sucker that works with TypePad. Input your TypePad username and password into our de-bloggerizer and blammo. Pick which stories you want to import and then you can time stamp them for a back-dated blog. If you don’t use TypePad, then no worries. For now you can have Dandelife suck in your latest entries with our RSS feed sucker/de-bloggerizer. We’ll be working some more in the coming months to create de-bloggerizers for Blogger, Moveable Type, WordPress and more.

Tags, tags, everywhere the tags - You can add tags to your stories. You can also add tags to stories by other people. We’ve even given you the ability to tag stories with people’s names or nicknames. By tagging stories you can see collections of stories all sharing those tags both by you and other users. Cool, eh? Here’s all the stories about marriages, for example.

Story/Life contextual navigation - When you’re reading a story and you find a writer whose voice you like, it’s nice to have some tools for seeing more of their life. That’s why we created a contextual menu that sits tot eh top right of every story page. In it you can click to thier vertical and horizontal timelines, the previous and next stories as well as save this story to your favorites page. And if the story you’re reading jogs a memory of your own, great!. We’ve got a button for that right there too.

RSS Feeds Galore! - RSS gets me excited. I just love the idea of people pulling content on their own time. Plus, what better way to stay on top of one’s Dandelife than letting them push that content to you via RSS. Here are a few RSS links of note:

• Most recent 20 stories (this changes quite frequently).
• My stories (change the username in the URL to change whose stories you pull).
• 
• Stories tagged with the word marriage. (Again, change out the tag word and you can pull stories with that tag instead.)



• Stories featuring Yosemite Sam (need I say more?).

Horizontal Timeline - I you go to the home page the first thing you see is what we call a horizontal timeline with a random assortment of stories in the system. Today there are about 300 hundred stories in the Dandelife network. Getting them all on one horizontal timeline is impossible simply because the screen size limits it. But we’ve peppered these Horizontal timelines throughout the site so you can narrow the pool of stories that would show up on the timeline. Search for tags or people and your results will be in a horizontal timeline. Why? Because it looks neat. You can ’scrub’ back and forth in the timeline to go back and forth in time. We also expand on the ‘tag cloud’ paradigm by making certain titles larger than others based on their arbitrary values. Plus it gives you some additional context at a glance for each story that comes up in those results. Anyway, the horizontal timeline is something we’re proud of. Watch for further developments on it in the future. It’s only going to get more feature -rich and usable.

Drafting - when you create a story but you don’t think it’s quite ready for prime time, you can save it as a draft. Saving a story as a draft means that it won’t show up in any horizontal timelines. It will only show up in your verticle timeline and is clearly italicized so you can tell the finished pieces from the unfinished ones.

Dandelife EDU - You’ll notice some nice banners at the bottom of every page which link to our help system and our demos (as well as a nice sign-up link in case you needed some more encouragement). The help system is a simple forum. I haven’t had time to do the forums justice, but I am watching them and will notice whenever anyone posts new comments or has questions. Watch that space for more user-friendly content such as FAQ’s. The demos page is exactly like it sounds. I’ve posted four starter demos there that show off how to create stories 4 different ways - from scratch, quick notes, from other people’s stories, and from your flickr photos. Watch the demos page for more topics. When we launch new features, we will be adding help topics and demos for those new features at the same time.

In mixed company I would argue companies are much like the people within them. They live for creativity. As a businesspeople, we tend to use terms freely that my English professors would scoff at. “Corporate culture,” “Proactive,” “Monetize,” and “Incentivize”. Why? Why, with grammar and style under constant duress, why would educated writers fuel the proverbial fire? Why is there so much language forged in the volcanic belly of business? The last thing we need is another corny concept as PR fodder.
If the word doesn’t exist, make it up. It’s not so much out of necessity, but out of a pure desire to be new, timely and ahead of the game. As a result neologisms are clearly indicators of an inventive mind. They are also an indicator of a lively culture and a fertile marketplace. When you’ve invented a word it’s a good sign that you’re in a lively culture and forging a new market. A culture like the Internet and a business like ours.

Yesterday I added a term to wikipedia that I felt needed to be defined. It was the word “lifecasting.” And a brief definition follows:

A lifecast is an online broadcast of one’s life publicly via the Internet. Much like in podcasting, videocasting and blogging, lifecasters generally intend their audiences to be very small and intimately in tune with the lifecaster him or herself.

Edward and I have been using this word in our development of the site. It’s a convenient definition of what people are doing on a daily basis when they post photos on flickr, add videos to youtube and blog about their own mundane lives. What we hope to add to the lifecasting world is the pleasure and enlightenment of looking into the past. If you’ll pardon the mixed metaphor, get ready to digitize those old home movies, scan those old photos and start dusting off those old stories - there are plenty of yarns to be spun in your new lifecast.