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Get a DandeLife

I was reading Ross Mayfield’s notes on a Wikimania talk when I noticed a little green and yellow icon in the sidebar. This turned out to be a web widget for DandeLife, a social biography network built around telling stories of personal experiences. Kelly Abbott is the idea guy behind this, but Ross Mayfield is also listed as an advisor. The term they use is lifecasting — broadcasting one’s life publically via the Internet. It is very cool that the term seems to have been coined on my birthday.

The dandeLife navigation

This new tool is very appealing for a number of reasons. First and foremost, it is very accessible. The HCI of this site is very nice, with simple links and labels (“Wander” … “Create” … “Invite”) to get to the important tools easily. The WYSIWYG and click-in-place editors are both hip and useful, and there are several levels of publication and view perspectives to cater to the wishes of the author to protect certain content. I’m of the Don’t Publish Unless You Want People To Read It mindset, but I can appreciate the simplicity and power of the option to let only friends or family read about your life.

DandeLife also works with Flickr and Youtube, two services we are resolved to explore at BlogSchmog in 2007. Along with regular RSS feeds, DandeLife does the work to combine images and movies with personal stories in a way that should be seamless to the normal production process. The intentional choice of leveraging the many existing systems for content is one of the reasons this networked community is likely to take off.

On the down side, the FAQ is a traditional forum that currently requires a separate, second account. Sometimes forum-style knowledge bases can be tedious to find answers to important questions.

My first story is nothing special, but I do like the idea of both visualizing the history of my life and finding the context of my stories in the lives of others in the network. Lifecasting is different from blogging in that regard; the stories themselves are connected, rather than the publications. This is where DandeLife can distinguish itself from other biographical tools, like WebBiographies, that rely on a holistic model of content.

By Kevin Makice

A Ph.D student in informatics at Indiana University, Kevin is rich in spirit. He wrestles and reads with his kids, does a hilarious Christian Slater imitation and lights up his wife's days. He thinks deeply about many things, including but not limited to basketball, politics, microblogging, parenting, online communities, complex systems and design theory. He didn't, however, think up this profile.

5 replies on “Get a DandeLife”

The most important word I neglected to mention is Beta. Among the problems encountered thus far are:

  • Some intermittent page load issues
  • Click-to-edit sometimes wreaks havoc with the Mac/Firefox browser display. Either it disappears entirely, or it shows up at machine language gibberish.
  • Some navigation problems browsing my own stories. Too many clicks to get where I want to go after editing, sometimes.
  • The RSS import didn’t interpret the dates correctly, nor does it appear to be automatic. Maybe a WordPress import is in the works (right now, they only have something for TypePad).

My custom RSS needs to be changed somewhat, as only the excerpts were included as content. I need to make sure that is the full version and that a link to the original post is included.

By Post Author

Thanks for the positive review, Kevin. Really appreciate your participation and feedback. I noticed your stories before I noticed this review. Good work. Let me know if there’s anything I can do to make Dandelife mo betta.

Thrive,
Kelly

BTW, the page load issues have been fixed. Hope you noticed. Looking into the RSS import bug. If it’s wonky, it won’t be for long.

Editing has been fixed. Related to the page load problem we had before.

I’m due to release a new version of the site with an updated nav structure (among other things). Hope you like it.

K

I’ll have to test out changes to the RSS import this month when we pull copies of the Amy’s “life” posts here and put them on her dandelife account. I started with about 145 posts imported but kept only about 75 on that site.

Next step is to start getting in the habit of writing some earlier memories and using the site for future milestones.

I also want to start exploring a few of the other tools – tags, “this reminds me”, favorites and fans – to see how my posts start integrating with others. I’m not a fan of manual tagging, but I made an effort to do in on the last 1/3 of the stories I added there. I’d like to see what effect my tagging has on searches and story-to-story connections.

I’m also not entirely clear why the my life list shows up as it does. There are different sizes, which I take to reflect # of views. And in the long, long list of 2005-2006 entries, the order keeps changing. I’m thinking that more prudent use of the “Everyone” (what everything but my drafts are now) tag will clean that up. I can use “everyone” for the best-of and to distribute events visually, and I can use “Fan” for anyone who wants to subscribe to read more. I don’t know what effect that has on searches within the community.

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