18/11: Cool Blog Widgets - OurStory.com

Blog widgets are everywhere these days, but OurStory.com caught my eye as being rather different and well worth a blog post. It’s something that will probably appeal to those with personal blogs rather than business oriented ones, but that’s not to say the concept is only of interest to bloggers. That is only part of the picture. This idea is going to appeal to a huge number of internet users who wish to capture, share and preserve stories of life.

So what is OurStory.com? Well, in the most basic of terms it’s a program that enables you to tell stories, to share them either publicly or just with family and friends. It’s a new concept in online journals if you prefer, a way for any number of people, to store and interact with one another, sharing a "timeline" organized collection of life stories. The applications for this are extremely wide ranging and there is a video on the site explaining exactly what can be done with the service, with examples of how many people are already using it to store and share everything from stories of their children’s lives, their parent’s lives, their own life experiences, their love stories, their travels, their family history and so much more.

The site enables people use multimedia, pictures, video and the written word to embellish and archive all that has been important to them - it’s almost like scrap booking but with all the bells and whistles of the digital age. I can see it being hugely popular among those who want to store and share nostalgic stories and important events in the lives of those around them and the interactivity, which is controllable by the owner of the OurStory.com timeline, is quite impressive.

The program owners have also enabled the option to integrate the whole thing with almost any website. You can embed any OurStory timeline into your MySpace Friendster, Blogger, TypePad, Xanga, Multiply or Wordpress sites and you can customize the size and design of the timeline to match the look and feel of your pages.

The service is free to use, and brings a whole new world for people to build life stories and share them with whoever they please, allowing contributions from others to build a database of information about their lives and the important moments in those lives. It allows users to make instant email notifications to their chosen audience, and in turn permits chosen people to add their own pictures or observations to the timeline. Staying in touch has now been made even more simple, comprehensive and interactive than ever before.

Technorati Tags: Scrapbooking, Genealogy, History, Life Stories, Love Stories, Wedding Albums, Births and Deaths, Family History, Sharing Stories, Digital Scrapbooks, Online Journals, Personal Journals