Inspiring Website My Life Story
Interview With Kristen Kuhns the Co-Founder of Top Memoir Website
Aug 19, 2008
Kristen Kuhns is the COO and co-founder of the Story of My Life website, a site dedicated to preserving the most precious of all assets - life stories of everyone. Kristen is also a writer and is currently writing a fiction novel.
Kristen took time out to tell Suite 101 about the services offered by her site.
Suite 101: Your site and services seem to bridge the gap between social networking and memoir writing. What was the inspiration to start Story of My Life®?
Well, that’s a very nice thing to say. Thank you for that. Several things actually inspired the site. The CEO and co-founder, Patrick Tardif, wanted a way to be able to leave a lasting impact and for people to record their stories. He’s a software architect, so this was an obvious segway. He actually reserved this domain in the mid 1990’s. Software evolved, and this notion of social networking made a perfect intro. Plus, he’s a hard core scientist-type and thought this was a bit of extra assurance, “just in case” there is nothing (after we perish), so it was his way of helping people record their legacies. I’ve helped bring the focus on featured people too – people who are too shy, too busy, too modest, or toil away without much recognition, and feature them and their great stories.
To us, what’s the point of writing your stories if no one can read them? By limited stories to one format people run the risk of stories being lost or destroyed (or worse: forgotten). This way people connect to each other through the generations.
Suite 101: What tools and facilities does your company offer?
The website makes it easy for people to create stories in any format – writing, audio, video, pictures – and load them and share them. Of course the site has granular privacy settings – public, totally private, limited custom access, or you can put things in your own time capsule to be released at some point (up to 99 years) in the future. This is in case you have stories to chronicle, but you’re perhaps not quite ready to share them.
Users can write in the way they feel comfortable – by subject, chronologically, or journaling (blogging), and then augment with multi-media. We have a lot of fun features too, such as a profile questionnaire so people can also read about your hobbies, what schools you attended and where you worked, and what your likes and dislikes were. This added layer of detail gives the readers a fuller sense of who exactly they’re reading about. The great thing too about the internet is that you can always go back and change, add, edit, delete…..
You can also create Groups and do collective stories, which is interesting. Besides the more obvious collections of families, many teachers are using this in the classroom to collect students’ stories and categorize them. We hope of course then the students will continue with the process throughout their lives – but it’s also that reading the stories is quite amazing with the different styles and voices and topics. It’s interesting to watch younger people start to show interest in their family histories, their ancestors, where they’re from, and start to think back about all the ‘butterfly effect’ events that led up to the points of their existences.
We recently added a rather new section where professional writers, Storytellers as we call them, find and write up stories about interesting people and fascinating stories. This has been a big hit so far.
Finally, we offer a way to help guard against losing these precious stories or files. The Story of My Life Foundation helps to preserve Stories and ensure their accessibility – in perpetuity.
And – more to come! We’re constantly looking to improve the site, make it easier to use, more features, and more fun.
Suite 101 also spoke to Kristen about the past and future of memoir writing and her own experiences and thoughts on memoir writing.
Kristen's Biography
Kristen was the Executive Director and one of the founders of the East Bay IT Group, one of the largest non-profits for technology executives in the San Francisco bay area. She is also the VP of operations at TierSolution, Inc. where runs the operations of the East Bay office, the office in Bangalore, India, and consultants worldwide.
Before joining TierSolution Kristen was the IT Liaison for Borden Capital Management Partners, the management team of Borden, Inc. as well as Assistant to the Controller. Prior to Borden she helped roll out one of the first largest b2c integrations for Pepsico, Inc. She was named one of the 40-under-40 to watch by the Bay Area Business TImes. Kristen graduated summa cum laude with a dual BA/MA in international business from Case Western Reserve University, Phi Beta Kappa.
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