CogDogBlog

I can agree with all the positive acclaim for the archive of Life photographs Google is hosting. It is a vast archive of important historical moments.

What is striking me odd that is not strictly mentioned on this site is any statement on usage of the images. I looked high and low, and I am rather perplexed that such a collection would overlook something I have found front and center (or footer and center) on every other photography or art archive online.

After my cursory research this is what you can do with this site:

• You can search or browser for images using the Google interface.
• You can look at the images.
• You can buy merchandise related to the image.
• You can (guessing) provide a link to the page holding an image

And that is it. Everyone who is embedding copies of these images is violating copyright. It is not clear if you can use an IMG tag in your own site that references the Google hosted one.

There is no statement of copyright beyond a © Time in the lower left and a @copy; Google in the bottom. It’s not clear who is copyrighting what, but would guess Time owns the image (so you will hear from Time’s lawyers) and Google is copyrighting their web page.

There is certainly no Creative Commons anywhere here.

Google has tags for finding the images, but you have no ability to tag anything yourself.

As a summary, I have this copyright violating diagram of a Country Doctor a typically expressive Life photo by W. Eugene Smith:

I tried first on that link “About images hosted by Google” and it just plopped me back to the entrance page. That is a really strange way to provide an explanation of the site.

I finally got as close as I could get to a terms of use in the “Help” section:

What can I do with the images I find from the LIFE photo archive?
You can browse and view the images you find, rate them, and see detailed information about the photographs. There is also a link to buy image merchandise provided by LIFE.

Yep. You cannot download them. You cannot stick them in your PowerPoints. You cannot embed them in your blog posts. They are 100% totally copyright locked down shut. It is not clear on linking.

Which is not really gonna stop people (case in point).

There is no actual detailed terms of use here (were the lawyers out playing golf on the day they designed the site?).

Perhaps I have overlooked something and someone with better insight will show me the errors of my ways.

I would want to know these things before gushing any more about how Great a Thing This Is. As is, they have replicated a magazine file cabinet that you can paw through, but don’t get your grimy fingerprints on the collection.

So excuse me if my joy is tempered. I may come back some day to just mosey around, but my kind of content I will pay attention to is open or if not, clear about it.

But at least I can buy a framed version of a locked piece of media.

I have come across a new, and less desirable mode of blogging.

Someone who just grabs something, tosses it on the glass, and leans their thumb on the green “copy” button of the Xerox machine (I thought of writing this as a “ditto” metaphor but would have lost most of my slim audience).

Yeah something I created got lifted and put elsewhere.

And I cannot do anything… because I granted permission.

So it goes like this. When Bryan Alexander and I published our Web 2.0 Storytelling article in the current issue of EDUCAUSE Review, we opted for the most liberal Creative Commons license- By Attribution- permission to re-use if someone just provides attribution.

But just because that permission is out there, and technically one can lift and re-publish– do people ever stop and consider whether it is the right thing to do? To me, the spirit of Creative Commons, of Re-use is to create something new built upon what you have take from, to give back, to contribute something of value to others out there. What is anyone doing for the greater good by just lifting and republishing en-masse? By just leaning their weight on that button and pressing COPY.

I track links, etc via afew different tools, and this is the second case I have found so far of someone lifting the HTML out of the EDUCAUSE site, here a some site purportedly about “emerging green business and community news” although most of the header links end up at some Proposition 8 protest blog (there is a very unwise blog practice, the “about” link for your blog tells you about some other blog, doh).

And here it is, the licensed material:

They copied the entire HTML from the EDUCAUSE web site and blogged it on their own.

And in that, I see zero attribution. Attribution means…

Attribution. You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work).

What does “Attribute this work” mean?
The page you came from contained embedded licensing metadata, including how the creator wishes to be attributed for re-use. You can use the HTML here to cite the work. Doing so will also include metadata on your page so that others can find the original work as well.

For any reuse or distribution, you must make clear to others the license terms of this work. The best way to do this is with a link to this web page.

And despite the rant here, I could really give a cat’s arse if someone wants to life the HTML form one site and shove it in their own.

I just don’t understand why someone would bother doing so.

So I posted a comment:

At November 20, 2008 4:32 PM Alan said…

As a co-author of the article, I am a bit curious why someone would just re-publish it in its entirety in their own blog site? We (the authors) did grant permission to re-use the content under Creative Commons - if you have attributed the article, which I really do NOT see any link to the original published source at EDUCAUSE.

But moreso, I am just plain curious what value it is for your site to be a mere carbon copy? I seek only understanding. We see blogging as a process of reflection, of adding commentary, of building on the work of others, of contributing back in kind… and I fail to see any of that on this web site.

Help me understand.

Again, just because you have granted the permission to re-use content- is a whole sale copy paste an ethical thing to do? What does it do for anyone?

Remember, doing the minimum is just that, the barest possible to squeak by. That is like striving to get a D and being content with that. In these times of uncertainty, where is the spirit of living above the barest minimum?

I just do not get the rationale of blogging by outright copying someone else’s work.

You might as well being doing something as worthy as sitting your hairy ass on the glass when you press COPY, cause that is the image you are projecting to the world.

Oh and hell yes, please lift this blog post and slap it in your blog like it was your own.. you have my permission!

From Iceland to the Big Screen in Moose Jaw by cogdogblog
posted 20 Nov ‘08, 12.25pm MST PST on flickr

We used Skype today for me to present live from Iceland to a group of teachers gathered for a workshop with Dean Shareski in Saskatchewan. Through Skype video and Dean flipping Firefox tabs with me, I did my first remote presentation of 50+ Web 2.0 Ways to Tell a Story

Crazy! Dean was even ustreaming it, so there is also a recorded archive:
www.ustream.tv/recorded/881271

Thanks Dean for setting this up. The technology worked flawlessly, the speaker maybe less so. It is always a bot detached presenting when you cannot really see much of the audience, but when they busted out laughing at the Blabberize talking Alpaca, I knew they were on target.

And talk about good timing! Just a few hours earlier, I picked up a ping from Jim Groom and had another stellar example, a student project report created in Glogster.

Please, if you create or come across some good educational examples done in any of the 50 Tools, leave a note in the discussion tab of my wiki. I sit on an RSS feed for that one and will add it to the other examples.

Thanks again Dean! And darned, I learned the hard way that Tim Horton is dead (you need to see the video to understand). Still, a good story can be done with his ghost…

photo credit: Alexis Deadly

• Accepting invitations to join the “Sexy Vampires”, “Naked Wonders”, or “Canon EF 17-40mm 1:4L USM” flickr groups, not to say they are uninteresting, but….
• Even looking at much less considering following “gift_registry”, “Quicken Loans”, “Rentmyhouse4derby”, or “secretfatloss” on Twitter. Yeah, that’s my crowd. Yep.
• Logging into Facebook. Why? People who never talked to me in high school are now wanting to be “friends?” gah
• Googling myself. I know where I am, why should I look?
• Getting out for some luscious Iceland photography. Weather again is drab, cold, and bleak lighting with extended probabiliity of sideways rain and grey fog.
• Finishing that coding project needed in early December. Wasted a few days trying to use someone else’s OCC (Old Crappy Code). That is one I need to get around to.

Last night for me here in Iceland I had an enjoyable time Skype videochatting with Chrissy’s class in Bangkok Thailand.

I got to meet Chrissy in September at the Learning 2.008 conference in Shanghai; she is on her own adventure in moving this year to Thailand to teach at an international school.

It was early morning in Bangkok and after midnight in Iceland when she called. Her students were so energetic, a handful all had prepared questions- they wanted to know about the weather, language, animals, food, dogs here in Iceland, and they got excited when I turned the camera to show them Skinna. They also were interested in my ideas on “exploration” which I gathered they were doing as a topic in Social Studies. When asked, I shared that my favorite places I have seen were the South Island of New Zealand (honestly, that was not for Chrissy’s sake, who is a kiwi) and of course, from where i live in the US, the Boss Ditch of the World.

Then a few of the most curious ones kept raising their hands to ask more questions. I think the biggest reaction was when I told them when the owners of the house return next week, they are making me a traditional dinner where the main course is reindeer. Then they told me some things about what it was like to live in Thailand. From my little window of a Skype camera I saw a roomful of motivated students.

Chrissy’s students are active bloggers over at Room202, where it looks like she has covered her blogging basics well with a blogging contract.

I like the clever bit of storytelling she set up with the story of Sam the Kiwi, a stuffed animal who got lost on the journey to Thailand- the story is played out by students adding to it via comments — this is really simple to do and very effective.

Thanks Chrissy for letting me visit! I had fun. Video pen pals or whatever you call this is so simple to do to connect a classroom to almost anywhere else in the world, so a tip of the bog hat to Chrissy for doing these activities. I am trying to think of as a 5th grade how I saw the world- flat pictures in the World Book Encyclopedia, film strips, and 16mm films… all were static information that was rarely a look at real people.

More Amazing iPhone Music Making: ZooZBeat by cogdogblog
posted 18 Nov ‘08, 4.08pm MST PST on flickr

Another "wow" for an iPhone app- ZoozBeat allows you to lay down "tracks" for different instruments- by touch, keyboard, or shake. The free version gives 2 background beats and 6 instruments; for a whopping $2.99 you get more instruments and an ability to overlay an audio track (not sure I want to do that) and to save your songs.

The cool iApps keep coming! Gesture-based portable music studio.

ZoozBeat
http://www.zoozmobile.com/beat/

I’ve not written anything on a paper calendar or DayTimer for more than two years; my cal is on the clouds with Google Calendar– We have all of the NMC stuff using it on our enterprise set of GoogleApps, for individuals and several group/project ones, and I can access and schedule them with my typically logged in setup for CogDogBlog.

It is almost fun to be organized.

But a new little tool makes it even better than a fresh bone.

Maybe this happens to you- you are looking at a conference event web site, or the airline booking page, or someone IMS and asks when the meeting is… and to get to your calendar, you need to open a new tab or window, fish around for a bookmark, and load it in a new space.

If you install GCal Popup in Firefox, getting to your calendar is like reaching in the candy jar. From any web page you are looking at, you can not only see your calendar by clicking the little icon in the bottom right- you can fully edit and navigate it as display as an overlay on the page you are currently looking at- so you don’t have to lose your site or navigate away:

You do your calendar checking or entry, and then dismiss it by clicking the button at the bottom.

Tabs stack things up out of site to the left and right; overlays just pile them like layers on your current view.

And why stop at calendar? How about an overlay access to Gmail? or for doing a Google search? It’s not that complicated; it is using one of the LightBox/Thickbox CSS code sets to display another URL content in a CSS div.

Well, whatever the way you think of it, I don’t care; I may even end up liking doing my calendar.

Note: To install the GCal Pop, since it is “experimental”, you have to create a free account on the Mozilla site. While you are there, check out URLBarExt!

You’ve heard the declarations.

Blogs are dead.

94% of them have not published in the last 120 days.

I did not have time today to visit all 133 million blogs Technorati has been tracking since 2002.

cc licensed flickr photo by john_curley

But I have often marveled at the gems I find by random link walking from blogs- like a hike without a map — from one story that catches my eye, I am curious about a link that leads me down a lovely path, and before I know it, I am finding beautiful information like stumbling into a field of shimmering golden poppies or a maroon mountain vista (little “v” damnit!).

And for me that is a key- if you are one of the 16 or 17 little people who blog, there’s not much originality in following the stories of the Big Boys and Girls, unless you put a different spin on a story. The Good Stuff is finding stuff all those Snooty A-listers are not writing about. There are more trails than you can imagine, and more treasures to find, share, and spend some valuable time wandering among.

This morning I had an idea.

Or maybe too much coffee.

Starting from my RSS reader, I had landed on an interesting story on a blog with a curious name. I got even curiouser about some of the blogroll or linklog names in the sidebar, and wondered, “How far can I wander? What would I find? Is it all tombstones, black rot, and blog tumbleweeds like those big shot writers for Wired try to tell us?’

I found not death, but teeming life.

I found people posting at an astounding rate, and original (and wonderfully strange and often deeply personal and quite silly too) stuff. And I could find no sign that people were in the vain pursuit of a front page Google Rank.

Nor are they lone blogs crying to the moon; they are rich with comments and links.

So take a walk with me…

• The trailhead is my RSS reader. I get some great visualization and fascninating “data as art” stories from Information Aesthetics . it was here I went down the trail just a few short clicks and ended up at….
• Strange Maps a collection of… not always strange but interesting maps. Like From Pickin’ Cotton to Pickin’ Presidents where maps of seeminly un-related content and more than a hundred years of time difference… make sense. I peeked over the edge of the sidebar and headed for….
• where the past predictions of the future, often camp or cheesy, are detailed- Paleo-Future. Like back in 1957, Commuting will be a Breeze, the future looked like we’d be commuting to work in highspeed flying buses! From here I found myself on a precipice with no way out; the blog links from here were but feint trails and nowhere I could continue. This happens when wandering, so I backtracked to Strange Maps and found a different path, down the road to…
• Bldg Blog all about architectural, and lots of great photos, like the collage art highlighted in Resampled Space- striking images of “new, fictional, architectonic structures.” Wow the view from here is amazing, but I saw a track leading me to…
• pruned which is still along this trail of architectural related paths, but diverges more into landscaping- and i saw something very familiar from my home start in the magnificent aerial photo looking down at the Central Arizona Project. Improbably, water is sucked from the Colorado River on the California border, pumped up over a 1000+ foot mountain, and then canals its way hundreds of miles to feed the farms and suburbs of Phoenix and Tucson. Now that is quite a journey, but we are going elsewhere, from this blog I can see a shiny odd structure called….
• candyland. I am not even sure what it is, collections of writings, reflections, and art, but liked the iconography of the traffic light in tomorrow land. Let’s hope the green light stays on, cause we have been stuck at this damned red light getting nowhere for 8 years! Feeling a bit hungry, I saw just up ahead…
• the bright colors, lively music, and wonderful food smells of Mexico Cooks. It was quite a bit of everything, and lots of pretty things to look at like La Feria del Hongo (The Mushroom Fair) in Senguio, Michoacán (mmmm, should I eat those mushrooms??). Feeling more adventurous, I caught up with…
• Musings of a Barefoot Foodie who made me smile, and worry a bit about the meal she was preparing— Steak with Ice Cream Sauce . Where else on this wild trail would you come across such things? She suggested I head down the road and catch up with….
• the warm glow of June Cleaver Nirvana and what a fun, rollicking, place this is! I spent some time taking in the fabulous images of Texas Safari (yes, there are camels in Texas! Why not?). Seeking a quiet spot to reflect under a tree, I found myself immersed in…
• Quotidian Vicissitudes. And here I found a priceless gem, something really worth sharing (for unlike a nugget of gold, I can make more gems simply by giving them away), The Commenter Meme. Memes are common here in the blog wilderness, but this one is worth thinking about, and maybe adopting as a learning/social networking activity. It asks you to list links to the last 10 commenters on your site, and then asks some questions about each one that requires you spend some time exploring what may be new blogs for you to answer a series of questions such as “1. What is your favorite post from number 3’s blog?” or “5. If you could give one piece of advice to number 7 what would it be?”. I can see teachers maybe doing this with colleagues, or with their students, or maybe… well, I hope you find this as valuable as I did, but sometimes you rush into town with gold and some damn rock expert tells you it is pyrite (which is still nice and shiny, IMHO). Having tucked the gem into my backpack, I saw up on the hill…
• Vanity Press a place that looks tranquil and plain at first, but draws you into to local stories like Revenge of the Wild Life where you get to understand the challenges of dealing with a problematic Friendly Neighbor (FN). Over on the same reflective ridge, I walked to….
• All My Own where I started a bit into the waters of I Didn’t Come With An Owner’s Manual, smiled, and wondered what the implication of RTFM in relationships. And then…. I ventured down into a valley of more colors than I could think possible called…
• Tales of a Tree Hugger and as someone who enjoys looking closely at flowers with my camera, spent some time pleasantly lost in the video Meditation on a flower. And after some time here, I strapped on my pack and…

And on and on I could go. But I will pass this to another hiker, another wanderer. I thought I was venturing into the Valley of Blog Death, but could not really map the places I found on that false map.

It is too late for Jim Groom and Tom Woodard who cinematicly presented warnings about zombies for the NMC Rock the Academy Symposium, but I missed a key resource for the zombie intrigued.

How remiss to have not shared the Common Craft cult classic- Zombies in Plain English:

There was so much there I did not know about zombies! They cannot swim and don’t like Costco!

Sometimes it can take months to answer a question; Robert, a colleague I met in Shanghai who teaches at Fudan University asked if I knew of any tools that would make it easy for his journalism students to generate their own mashups of data and maps. I did not have an answer then; I talked about being able to easily annotate maps in Google MyMaps (bit this was a manual process) and other ways of connecting data and maps required a bit more technical chops.

Much too late, I do have a better answer now, Geocommons which (sigh, why would any site put a description of their service as a freakin graphic! let me copy paste!):

delivers visual analytics through maps; enabling non-technical professionals to view multiple datasets, draw conclusions, make decisions and solve problems without traditional GIS overhead

More or less, by clicking, you can select from a library of different data sets, and then layer them on a map (There are ways of adding your own data to the Finder).

Some quick examples:

• Prevalence of Bike Commuters in Less Obese States http://maker.geocommons.com/maps/566: So does one cause the other??
• Wait Time At Polls, November 4, 2008 http://maker.geocommons.com/maps/1334: using data from Twitter Vote Report
• Number of Facebook Users in the US http://maker.geocommons.com/maps/83?page=1: Is it for city folk only?
• Freshmen are Criminals http://maker.geocommons.com/maps/352?page=1: Not a conclusion I would make- looks like someone else was playing with data!

I gave it the 20 minute spin this morning, creating a world map that attempts to conclude that countries in violent conflict don’t do well in the Olympics (duh, it is just an experiment):

http://maker.geocommons.com/maps/1475

There was another layer I had tossed in to map cities with the tallest skyscrapers, which was meaningless and made more clutter than interest.

I poked around the sets of data until I found two things that maybe were not directly associated. Data sets can be..data associated with place, but also include things like roadways and geographic boundaries (like school districts, maritime regions). There are display options for the way data is distributed and displayed (colors, circles or squares).

The data is tagged, and you can combine tags and keywords in the searches- the results are a bit tedious in that they are paged 4 at a time. It would also have been nice if once I had made base map on a world scale, if I could filter out data sets that were at a different scale (like crop yields in Iowa). The data is also spotty, in some places there are pages and pages of EPA data, but the geography boundary category only has 2 items. It would also be nice if the results had an embed code.

But this is minor compared to the kinds of things you can create by connecting data and maps, and to visualize relationships. You may not achieve the energy of Hans Rosling, but I see a lot of potential here, be it in learning how to look at data (and then research whether there is a real meaning or just accidental correlation). Or an activity to add your own geodata to the collection.

Mashing up data and maps is so easy a dog can do it!