Life story caching

Dandelife is a social biography network: a social network built around telling life stories. Building on the notion that stories are best shared, Dandelife offers everyone the opportunity to write and share their personal memoirs online, one story at a time. A user’s ‘vanity page’ shows a horizontal timeline, with events neatly placed in history, as well as photos, videos, tags and favourite stories. Tagging is an important part of storytelling on Dandelife, allowing users to create common threads within their own stories, and connect with those of other members. Besides regular tags (relevant keywords for a camping trip could be ‘camping’, ‘hike’, and ‘grizzly bear’), a user can also tag stories with the names of people involved in the story. Being thoroughly Web 2.0, Dandelife works seamlessly with Flickr and YouTube, letting users import photos and videos to illustrate their narrative. San Diego-based Dandelife, launched two months ago, is currently in beta and free to use. Other recent ventures in the same arena include OurStory, WikiBios, and Eternity4All (featured in Springwise in April 2006). It’s all about what trendwatching.com calls life caching: collecting, storing and displaying one’s entire life, for friends, family, or the entire world to peruse.