The Dandelife Blog

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

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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There’s a very subtle mention of Dandelife in this article on the Read/Write Web blog from this week. In it we are used an example of a web app that’s useful for something. And that’s that.

I have insight to the web desktop debate as well. But I’ll do that over there.

Webified Desktop Apps vs Browser-based Apps

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.

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.

In this month’s Seed Magazine, there’s an article on page 43 by Sean Carroll, a cosmologist at the University of Chicago, about the arrow of time. It’s a two-page spread about how time - unlike space - only makes sense when it is observed going in one specific direction. You can look in a mirror and your surroundings still make sense, as it were. But if you watch a movie backwards, on the other hand, the mirror world backwards world makes no sense at all.

I won’t go into detail (for that, you can pick up a copy of Seed Magazine yourself) about why and how time trajectories may actually begin to make sense but I will say that from a Dandelife point of view, there’s nothing to worry about time suddenly beginning to flow backwards. It’s just a natural side-effect of blogging about your past.

Sean is one of the bloggers at CosmicVariance.com. It’s a fun blog and well worth a daily ping. If you like science, the observable universe and grasping at knowing things that would prefer to be cosmic secrets, especially.

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.”

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