Digital Biographer™

Digital Biographer Digital Red Nose

I had the idea to create Digital Nose Jobs for Red Nose Day (13th March), inspired by @jamie_oliver on Twitter.

I’ve done a few Nose Jobs this week to raise money for the UK & African projects that Red Nose Day supports. You can still order a red nose if you’d like (I have time for about another 15 4 nose jobs today!

Great minds obviously thinking alike, I’ve since discovered you can also have an official Red Nose Day Digital Nose Job - for just £1 (again, all money goes to Red Nose Day). Not as exclusive, but just as much fun - my one’s below.

Official Red Nose Day Images £1 from http://digitalrednose.com

• Red Nose Day is at http://rednoseday.com
• Digital Red Nose is at http://digitalrednose.com
• My Profile Makeover (Red Nose Job) is at http://bit.ly/rednose

UPDATE 16-Mar: I raised $220 for Red Nose Day - which itself raised over £59m ($74m). Thanks to all who helped to promote and especially to those who bought a ‘nose job’.

2.0, blonging, digital biographer, microblogging, share, social media avatar, digital biography, fun, profile t, rednose, rednoseday, rednoseday2009

‘Keeber-biograph‘, meaning Cyber-Biographer.

This is a term I came across today when searching through Yandex, the Russian search engine that’s been in the news recently, and which is rightly proud of the fact that, thanks to them, Russia is one of only four countries where Google is not the significantly dominant search engine.

The term came up in a blog by Maya Kim, in the context of an article by Steve Rubel entitled ‘Three Emerging Digital Careers to Watch‘ and I was interested to see that only one of the three terms Steve had used had been expanded and given further clarification using English terms in the context of a Russian blog.

Steve’s Term of Super Cruncher was unchanged, and Chief Customer Experience Officer was simply translated into Russian as ‘Head of the Department of Quality Service for Clients’. But his term ‘Digital Storytellers’ was translated into Russian as ‘Cyber-Biographer’, and also expanded to include the English terms ‘digital storyteller, cyberspace concierge, blog butler, ghost blogger, digital biographer‘.

I recall the terms ‘Cyber Concierge’, ‘Blog Butler’ and ‘Ghost Blogger’ were used when BBC News 24 wrote about my work over a year ago, but I was surprised, and quite delighted, to find this reference being made. (For those of you who may not be aware of the fact, I speak fairly good Russian.)

I like the term Digital Storyteller - it’s a good description of some elements of my work. But I still think that ‘biographer’ is closer to describing things accurately:

biography

noun ( pl. -phies)
an account of someone’s life written by someone else.
• writing of such a type as a branch of literature.
• a human life in its course : although their individual biographies are different, both are motivated by a similar ambition.

2.0, brand, digital biographer, online identity, search marketing, social media, Кибер-биограф digital biographer, digital biography, Google, Russia, Search, Web search engine, Yandex

Sometimes, a name escapes you. This name escaped me when I was referring to an online tool that let you create your own private or public timeline of data, images, or references. Digiddy? Diggedy? Dittley? Bo Diddley? It just did not come to the front of my mind.

The name I was looking for was “Dipity“. Below, you can see how the increasing online-savvy LiverPool Post has made a timeline of 20.08.2008 to celebrate Liverpool’s year as City of Culture.

The service from Dipity is a great way to share images, text and video, and place them into a contextual container which automatically assumes an interactive timeline format. It’s an excellent way to tell a story about an event in a linear patten, but with non-linear input from amny different sources or individual contributors, and it’s worth visiting the site to see some examples of how Dipity is being used.

I’m working on some projects that involve usind Dipity and some of its associated ‘mashup tools‘ to illustrate an individual’s biography and ‘lifestream’ as outlined at British Blogcasting Corporation - and this is, of course, almost made for anything you’d want to call a ‘digital biography‘!

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