The Dandelife Blog

“The Letter”

You know the kind of letter I’m talking about. Say you get in touch with a girl you knew back in middle school. Someone you knew because your older brothers used to hang out. Then you had little 6th grade crushes on each other that went nowhere except for — maybe — the Saturday matinee. You went the rest of your middle school years socializing in the same group of friends, going to the pool in the summer together, eating at the same table in the cafeteria. And when you passed each other in the hallway, you said “Hi, how are you doing?” and were genuinely interested in the response.

So you write the letter [and she makes mental notes].

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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

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…)

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I’m loyal to digg to a fault. I’m not the kind of guy who gets the scoop on stories on digg. But I do DIGG stories on a regular basis and depend on digg to send me interesting content. I am, to be certain, much more loyal to digg than reddit or newsvine. I don’t know why. Maybe it’s just the popular hang-out I dig, so to say.

However, one of the problems I have with Digg is the fact that there doesn’t seem to be a place to DIGG stories that fall outside of the interests of their tech-base. Digg, and if you get dugg in particular, can be a very powerful promotional tool. As a fan of LifeHacker (and would-be advertiser, would that I had the budget to do so) I know firsthand the power of having a front page DIGG story. Lifehacker Editor Gina Trapani told me recently that when Lifehacker recently launched a feature which allows readers to DIGG a story from withing the story itself (a simple feature) that it helped move the traffic needle. DIGG, she claims, can account for an additional 40,000 + page views to a particular story if the story makes it to digg’s front page.

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If the Sudanese Government can expel a UN Envoy from Darfur because of what he says on his blog, how would the blogosphere react? The time is now for bloggers around the world to speak up and take action for the benefit of the 200,000 dead and 2.5 million refugees in Darfur.

It’s autumn in America. That means it’s time for football on Saturdays, raking leaves, and gaining all the weight you’ll resolve to lose right around January 1. Autumn is also the season where broadcast television gives us some new stories to wrap our noodles around. On Sunday night chances are you and most of your friends are watching one or more of the following: Sunday Night Football on NBC, Extreme Makeover: Home Edition on ABC, or 60 Minutes on CBS. Each varies in its direction and degree of impact on society and culture. Sunday Night Football is an entertainment lobotomy - the end result is not to be inspired or motivated for world change. Extreme Makeover, on the other hand, does for do-gooders what ought to be done. I have no problem taking my shameless Sears and Ford promos with an hour-long rebuilding of a deserving American life. 60 Minutes has been a Sunday night mainstay on broadcast television for over 38 years now. It consistently pulls in high ratings and has a simple, formulaic television journalism style that can be copied but rarely matched by the other networks (20/20, 48 Hours, try as they might).

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A buddy of mine put this co-promotion together for VMIX - another San Diego dot-com start-up - and JVC. It’s a contest for creating a commercial for JVC for their new Everio camcorder (the first hard drive-based camcorder). The winning commercial will be played on national television. And you get $2500 to boot.

While you’re there, you can do a video ad-lib (see picture) that JVC put together. More shameless promotion than you can shake your tapes at.

JVC Create Our Commercial Contest

Contest aside, this looks like one badass camera. I would love to go tapeless. I ain’t modest.

One of the questions that people ask me when they see my Dandelife page is “How do you remember all that stuff?” The short answer is “Dandelife!” After all, that’s why I created this site.

The long answer is something like this…

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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