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.
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.