iconolith

Dandelife Lookin’ for Some Love

If you think Dandelife is cool, then you should consider buying one of their t-shirts. The blogging platform/social network, set apart by its use of graphical timelines and convenient widgety things like a connector to Flickr, apparently has been a labor of love - and we all know how they can be.

That’s why Kelly Abbot is asking that you buy one of Dandelife’s t-shirts. Not because you want to walk around all day getting hugs from strangers, but because it is like one big green t-shirt-shaped hug from a community that started with a great idea. If that is too cheesy for you, you can just read the real story behind the “Free Hugs”.

If you haven’t tried Dandilife, it actually has some really great features that make it an engaging way to tell the story of your hum-drum daily life with pictures, a timeline view, a story view, and a widget with which to share your timeline in another blog. Definitely all good things, but even better are the other ways to use it… like Shauna Schullo’s class that chronicled the history of distance education as one of their assignments using Dandelife. This is their timeline below:

So back to the t-shirts - they’re just helping keep a good thing going.

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Super Happy Funtime Friday

There isn't much to say about this week other than, "OMG can I please stop being busy for a little bit?" I think the answer is yes, and I'm counting on it seeing as how we have a holiday right around the corner. Even with stuff happening all around there are a few notable things for Funtime Friday:

Google’s Webmaster Central - Lately I've been feeling a little out of touch with how things work in behind the search engine scenes. It's just one of those necessary evil things one has to constantly keep up on. In an attempt to get off my a**, I've started going through the Google webmaster tools and have been spending a little extra time reading SEO articles - as much as I can stand anyway. SEO… SES… so many acronyms make me sleepy.

Getting Real - 37signals' book about the philosophies that have enabled them to accomplish what they have in so little time. You can buy the book PDF or read the entire thing for free online.

viki.works has released a second set of round social-web icons. I'm not so sure I’m a fan of the roundness or the largeness of these icons, but they are a welcome change of pace from the minuscule sets that are all over the web.

thinglink - a web site that allows you to upload images of things you make, add details about those things, and tag them with a unique identifier. They have updated their site with some new functionality and a facelift. Why is this cool? Well, aside from the obvious tagging coolness, it is a great way to connect more information about an object - what it's made of, the history behind it, or even the inspiration. I baked a cake once and connected the recipe to it on thinglink. The image wasn’t so hot, but the cake was yummy.

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Walk2Web – Internet Degrees of Separation

Walk2Web is an incredibly addictive (though not time efficient) web-based surfing tool that allows you visually browse the internet using links that connect one website to the next. As if that wasn't engaging enough, it is also possible to create a user account that can contribute to the rating, tagging, and commenting on any site you happen upon. There are also icons to send pages to digg, StumbleUpon, del.icio.us, and Hatena.

*Note that there is a text reader that is enabled by default on the system that will read page titles aloud when you click on a link. If your speakers are cranked it is quite a surprise.

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Raving in Kaneva

OMG, the residents of Kaneva are raving lunatics - literally. I signed up for an account and revisited my profile to find 21 strangers had raved me. I think I missed something in that world and need to go back and explore further than the mall.

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Twingly

Twingly is a screensaver that serves as a visualization of the global traffic in the blogosphere… and very addictive to watch. Normally, I run the open source Electric Sheep screen saver, which is very pretty, but I’m switching over on my main machine to run Twingly. (More at Primelabs)

Note:  does require that you run a current version of .NET, so setup may be a process depending on how up to date you keep your system. [via]

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