The Dandelife Blog

You may have noticed that I just added advertising to this blog in the top right corner of the site. Just thought you’d like to know that I’m experimenting with advertising. If you have any feedback, I’d love to have it. The blog is often the proving ground for *features* that may show up elsewhere at Dandelife.com. Enjoy!

S-p-e-e-d

No doubt you’ve noticed that the site has been slow lately. Thankfully we have the problem of being a regularly visited Web site. With that luck comes the task of making the experience an enjoyable one for those who regularly visit. That said, load times for any particular page lately has been hovering in the nasty region of 10-15 seconds. Yikes!

Yesterday, my right-hand-man, Shakhruz was able to get those load times down to a more acceptable range of 2-4 seconds. Some pages, like your vanity page, your buddy list, etc. can be long if you have a lot of stories or buddies. But individual stories, the home page, the wander pages are all much, much quicker thanks to his efforts.

What  you see below are the two reports I use most often. One shows load times and outages which I monitor using a (very expensive) web-based site monitoring system. The second is good ol’ Google Analytics, which is free and helps me figure out how many visitors, page views and referrers I have each hour, day, week, month and year. As  you can tell, at about 2PM PST yesterday, the floodgates released, and our traffic surged as a result. What does that mean? Well now that the site takes less time to load, it’s more enjoyable and people stick around for longer. As my buddy, Aaron would say, “Easy, peasy, Japanesey.” We hope you find it peasy, too.

Load Time

Traffic

Last week I posted the dandelife widget to widgetbox and this week we made the front page. Nice!

Widgetbox

And the Dandelife widget on widgetbox.

Rafe Neeldeman responded with a comment on yesterday’s post with a link to more details from the discussion over at his blog. The ideas is beginning to take form. I’m thinking it would  be a good idea to get the guys at Twitter involved. Seems that they have the infrastructure already in place to get mobile message-response going. Twitter mashed up with Platial for a trip status updater. I think another layer to add would be an emergency contact round-robin. If you stray from course or fail to respond to a check-in, your emergency list will be contacted who will then be responsible for assessing the severity/lethality of the situation and calling the authorities if necessary.
A Webware challenge: Make cell phones better lifelines

Their words, not mine. I just got a marketing message from one of my registrars pimping the .mobi second level domain. I started looking into it and noticed that the .mobi’s have a pretty good documentation for making apps look good on mobile devices. I don’t know how legit the .mobi TLD is, given that you can accomplish for the small screen with CSS and user-agent detection anyway - one hardly needs a .mobi extension to get the right mobile message. Upon further investigation the organization looks a lot like a professional consortium (like the Wi-Fi Alliance) to me including registrars, mobile operators, site owners, device manufacturers in their working “advisory group.” Nevertheless, their effort at .mobi is largely in developer education lumped into wha they call “Switch On! Guides” 

• .mobi Developer Guide is the meatiest.

Thought you might like to take a look at their standard’s guide, but to be honest, I don’t know why one would marry their domain to a TLD. It seems to me that the first rule of technology is that it’s always in flux. One day you’re a hot dot-com and the next your a dud-dot com when all the cool kids are playing in the dot-us pool.  Anyway, there you have it. Go dot-mobi and see if it’s your cup of tea. Me? I’m loosely-coupled.

I watched the story unfold on my computer. I’m not much for TV these days for my news - so when I saw the original CNet post for help in finding James Kim in Oregon last week, my first reaction was the correct one.

At the time I thought it was remarkable that an APB could be sent out so efficiently by those concerned for James and his family. It helps, for sure, that James worked at CNet. It also helped that he was loved in the community of technology writers and editors who could get the message out to all the right people in all the right places that they were missing. Of course, this is not proven by my getting the message in San Diego, but there is little doubt that getting the message out on CNet, and then Wired, and then CNN and MSNBC until it became a part of this week’s national news when we would learn of his tragic death only days after his family’s salvation.

Two days ago, I learned of James’ death and read about it many times over as Lifehacker, Tech Crunch, and many of the news feeds I read posted obituaries. I read and re-read the memorial that CNet posted on their homepage, having dedicated the home page to him and his family for the day.

Then yesterday, I got an email forwarded to me by Edward who himself recieved a forward from Di-Ann over at Platial where Rafe Needleman from CNet asked if sites like theirs would be willing to help create a tool that was requested by the CNet HR department to aid in emergencies like this. The tragic events of James Kim’s last ten days help tell a compelling story about how inadequate technology can be when and where we need it most. But the question still remains: what can we do to help?

To help what? Prevent events like this from happening again? Aid in search and discovery missions? Improve on disaster response, missing persons reporting and search and rescue organization? Yes, yes and, most definitely, yes.

As yet, I haven’t heard back from Platial, who seems to be taking the lead on this. I am genuinely interested in becoming a part of an effort to save lives and to answer that question. We will figure out what can be done in situations like this. As I learn more about this project, I will share more here. Until then, if you’re the praying kind, say a prayer for James, his family and those at CNet and around the world who miss him. If you’re not the praying kind, say one anyway.

Following up on my previous post, I thought I’d investigate what it took to become an honest to goodness citizen journalist. Basically, it’s just another way to donate your Flickr photos to a higher cause. If you were there when something interesting happened, then snap away. Upload it to Flickr and then let Yahoo! You Witness know. The steps are easy. It’ll be interesting to see if the next Rodney King video gets posted here before YouTube - or whether this turns into an auditioning tool for young, web-savvy talent. If suspect the latter is more probably considering the sheer lack of conent that is already lacking here. Snapshots from the upload process follow. (more…)

Saturday night I’ll be going to a party, as is the custom this time of year. I’ll also be thinking of my TiVo, who at home will be snagging a little gem for me to watch when I get home. Ali Rap is an upcoming entertainment special on the life and words of Muhammad Ali. They hype for this show is all over the place. There’s some highbrow praise from NPR as well as regular commercial rotation on the Disney network stations (ABC and ESPN) including this article from ESPN the Magazine. (more…)

Yahoo Announced this week that they have a new site for news. The news as only you can report it. The site is called “You Witness” and functions as a destination for self-publishing event from the very recent past. It’s a scoop site for local news. And every once in a while, it will no doubt be THE place to go for breaking international stories. A site like this would have been great to have during Katrina, the Tsunami or 9-11. I hope the site is successful. (more…)

I published another article at iMedia Connection this week. There’s always a feeling of vulnerability in publishing anything. Exposing the world to your thoughts is not as easy as it seems. I say that because my latest article will ruffle some feathers. I wrote about the commercialization of SecondLife, which is a massive, multiplayer game whose content is created entirely by its members. I love the idea of it, even if the execution could be made more rewarding. It has some growing up to do. And as such, it also has some growing pains to overcome. Namely, commercial growing pains. SecondLife, I argue, is going to have to learn to live with its capacity to be commercialized. There’s no way around it. I offer a less bleak way of doing so in the article, but nevertheless, I have a feeling that most SL members will find my conclusions disturbing. SecondLife is not designed to be a refuge from commerce. So commercial and residential will have to learn to get along.

I’m bringing this up on the Dandelife blog now because I fear the same will be true of Dandelife. I know Dandelife cannot survive on my good looks alone. I’ve been reluctant to commercialize the site beyond Google adsense for the time being. I’d like my members to think that I have their best interests at heart when I finally figure out a way to match the needs of my advertisers with theirs as members. We’re in it together, after all.
iMedia Connection: The Marketing Reality of a Virtual World