Digital media: explained by others, compiled by me, presented to you

A recent article in Mashable pointed me to a new website that promises to help you stay on track of your resolutions: Dorthy. The site promises to give the user a living page that focusses on their specific goals, provides information on said goal, and connect the user to other like-minded goal searchers.  It’s a focussed Google with a bare-bones community attached.

On first visit, I’m left wondering what to do after I input my dream: to find more time to update this website (lame dream, yeah). I’m taken to an overview page (called a dreampage – very Oprah-esque) that looks similar to what I would find if I typed “I want to find time to update my website” into a Google search: I see online articles, videos pulled from You Tube and Vimeo, photos and links to blogs that I think have the “update website” phrase within their copy. Since it seems to work by automatically pulling keywords (even though the site says “We’ve abandoned key words and moves beyond traditional semantics to develop an implicit understanding of what you’re interested in,”) I wonder if this blog entry you’re reading now will eventually show up in this Dorthy feed about updating websites? Vouldn’t that be Veird?

When I click on the community tab, it takes me to other members who have entered similar goals and I can subscribe to their dreams so my own page is updated with their updates. From what I can see, there’s no way to contact the person, which the introvert in me likes but may have helped create a virtual “cheerleader” squadron to the user’s goal achievements. The site uses Facebook Connect, which could translate that community support from Dorthy onto a Facebook page, I suppose.

Snooping around, I see someone entered a dream to run a marathon in Maui. This opens a dreampage that’s a little more focussed than my vague goal but again, I don’t see anything I wouldn’t have seen without entering the same dream into a search engine.

This isn’t to say the site doesn’t have potential… As more people subscribe and enter data, perhaps the algorithms will improve and my Dreampage will be more relevant and less vague.

Maybe I’ll set a goal on this site to review Dorthy in 6 months to see what’s changed on the site.

Let me know what you think and what sites you use to keep on track of your goals.

Some work-related… and not work-related fun:

The phrase we hear more than anything when it comes to the web is “how do we monetize this?” Well, if you’re starting up some social media on your site, or you’re about to, Mashable offers up some interesting tips and a suggestion to read a blog by KD Paine.

If ROI measurement isn’t your thing, maybe you’ve always wanted to know what your name would be if it were a piece of IKEA furniture. How’s that for a natural jump in logic! For Your Reading Pleasure translates into FJÅRD YOUR REDDING PLESJUR. Foryourreadingpleasure is:  SFORIÅYRREDDYNNGPLESJUR.

Speaking of funny names, my pal once typed in her name, Jayne, and it spell checked “Do you mean Kanye?” Read her stuff for some really funny observations on life. And any comments to her should be address as Kanye, for kicks.

No. Seriously. She will probably try to kick me if you do that.

And yes… she did push For Your Reading Pleasure on her site too, but that’s what teh interwebs (sic) is all about!