The Dandelife Blog

We launched over a month ago and since then, we’ve accumulated over 10,000 stories from about 4,000 members. Along the way we’ve discovered some new voices and made some new friends.

Today I’m happy to report that we have launched some new features to make dandelife more fun and useful in keeping your past up to date. Here they are:

Buddies everywhere.

The theme of this release is Friends, Family and Fans. That’s what we call buddies. in other words those are the people you want to add to your buddy list. Well now you can add other users to your buddy list, send invitations to your friends to join, add your buddies to your stories, and find your real friends in the dandelife network. Here are some screenshots showing you how.

Add an existing member to your buddy list from his or her dandelife home page.

Add a member to your buddy list from within his or her stories.

Convert your “people” to “friends, family and friends.” What? Well if you have a friend who you’ve already been adding to your stories, we can help you find that person on the site. Click on his or her name “tag” and if there’s a member who has signed up with a similar name, we’ll show you how to make the connection.

What do you do if those people are not currently on Dandelife.com? Invite them to join!

Invite your friends and family to join dandelife with our invitation form.

Adding people to stories. Now that you have buddies, you can add them to your stories with a “people” tag. We had that functionality before, but now when you add actual members to your stories, they link to that user’s dandelife instead of just your stories about them.

My Life, My Photos, My Videos and My Blog

Since you’re using dandelife to house your life, we thought it was appropriate that you might want to have pages dedicated to more than just your stories. That’s why we created pages in your dandelife that show off all of your photos, your videos, and your buddies. We have a page that shows off your most recent stories. If you’ve added people to your buddy list, then we have a page for you to see their latest stories too. Neat!

My life, my subnav:

My buddy’s subnav:

My global subnav (when I’m signed in):

Badges and blogging

Many of our users do still have their blogs on their own websites. That’s why we created the timelet badge shown below. It’s an image you can include on your blog that randomly selects 5 stories from your life to display in a mini-timeline on your blog. If you click on the link, it’ll take you to your dandelife homepage.

Here’s an example of the code that you would include in your blog’s source code to get that image to display:

You can find links to any user’s badge and badge code within the home page for any given member (the green dandelion icon below the RSS feed icon shown below).

What else?

There are plenty of little additions we could mention, but that would ruin the fun. Go spend a few minutes combing through the site and find them for yourself. Do me a favor and add a few more stories while you’re at it. I’m always on the hunt for good writers to mention in our blog, in our newsletter and on our home page.

A “graphic novel” that helps illustrate things that actually happened is called what exactly? The authors of the forthcoming graphic re-presentation (seen above) of the facts uncovered in the 9/11 Commisssion Report (seen below) call their approach “graphic journalism.” Whatever the name, as I listened to them describe the book to the host of Talk of the Nation yesterday I couldn’t help but think how useful Dandelife will be in illustrating the who-what-when of highly complex events like 9/11. In addition to serving a source for getting our shared experiences of 9/11 told, simply seeing a visual presentation of the timelines of 9/11 would prove to be highly educational. This is one of the things the authors hope to bring to the 9/11 experience - understanding. Surely that must be reason enough to buy the book. I can’t wait until its release date on August 31. Until then, there’s everything you’ve said about 9/11 - which counts for something.

Click on the images to add these books to you amazon wishlist or cart.

“She was a pretty girl in 1935; she was a beauty in 2002!” is how this little gem starts off. The story is a true one. And why not? Southwest has my heart too. Good on ya, LUV.

Southwest Airlines - LUV Story

Leah Peterson did a little interview with me this week. If you have any questions about the who, the what and the why of dandelife.com it’s a dern good place to start.

Link

John just sent me this link. It’s a good story on a vernacualr photography blog called bigghappyfunhouse. Love the site because it’s one of those rare nostalgaic gems that reminds you just how rich, beautiful and storied the past is. This particular post is about the end of an era at Comisky Park - where the Chicago White Sox used to play. Well-written and worthy of a place on dandelife.

bighappyfunhouse • found photos. free pie. • hi andy

I read about this insanely detailed, very well-written, astutely-researched e-Book on the Beatles Revolver album in this week’s Rolling Stone. Sure enough, I found an insanely detailed, very well-written, astutely-researched e-Book on the Beatles Revolver album at the end of the road. Any student of rock, fan of the Beatles or armchair pop-culturist would love to mosey on down abbey road and download a free copy of this e-Book. It’s long so you may want to print out a few pages and consume over a few nights.
Abracadabra: The Beatles: Revolver

The good folks at KUSI gave me three minutes of air time this morning. It was a whirlwind interview that went rather well. They will be posting a clip of the segment soon, I hope. Here’s the url for the blurb on today’s show.

KUSI NEWS - Daily Lineup - Thursday, August 17th, 2006

From Contra Costa Times (bay area print newspaper, circulation 200,000) on Tuesday:

A DANDY LIFE
Haven’t you always wanted to write the story of your life? Well, now it’s as easy as hopping online. No, not another blog. Please, no.

Try www.dandelife.com, a new Web site that’s bringing out the biographer in us all. The site’s been up less than a month and already claims more than 3,000 members. It takes the social networking thing to a whole new level:

The notes you scrawled at that cafe in Venice (and that waiter, Jean-Luc!) now have a home on a literary timeline that includes someone else’s trip to Tijuana and another’s touching encounters with autism.

Six degrees? You bet. It’s more like traveling with the world.

Got photos on Flickr or videos on YouTube? Groovy. Combine those images and movies with stories about the people, places, things and events in them. We heart the whole concept.

Thanks, CCTimes. We heart you too.

Link - John Donohue cartoon in the New Yorker.

A few weeks ago Stephanie and I went to the Bay Area to hang out with Jess and see the city together. We’d both been there as individuals before - for both work and pleasure. This time it was intentionally done to get away from work. Here’s a link to my dandelife entry about that trip. It has pictures, some video, and a full description of the weekends goings on. What that story also relates is how I came across an essay by Joan Didion called “The White Album” originally published in the 70’s as a part of the larger book of essays by the same name.

Essays to me are the easiest form of literature. Poetry is dessert. Non-fiction - in a longer format - a healthy meal. Fiction, a full, rich meal with friends. Essays, a weekend wine. Memoirs are for me the pinot noir of essays. I love the intimacy, their lasting fullness, and their tenor that only comes from having a particular voice whispering in your head.
Of course, it’s more than the voice that matters. The feeling that the story happened somehow matters as well. So does the notion that the events being portrayed happened to the person telling the story. There’s a directness in the format that rewards the listener in a way that fiction almost never does. In memoir, all of the layers of the proverbial onion are peeled back. What’s left but a naked author and her thoughts? It’s a brave medium when done especially well. Even when done poorly, by amateurs, for example, the format itself can be especially sharp.

If my feet were to the flames, and someone asked me what my loftiest goal for Dandelife is, I would say this: to create a space for wine-makers to perfect their delicate craft; to bring the wines of the worlds newest vintners to the lips of true connoisseurs.