CogDogBlog

It’s interesting to get smidgens of insight into how people link to your blog. For a window of time last week I saw an interesting pattern (when was traveling and missed out on the week of celebrity deaths).

Look at the keyword searches people used in Google to get to CogDogBlog:

It’s all Farrah all the day in the keyword search box linking to my mention of her poster and how it reflected the TV age I grew up in which is now gone.

Even more curious is that I paged through 10 pages of Google search results and could not find one link to my blog. People are diving in deep!

May they find what they seek…

In some of my recent attempts to get good video on YouTube, I seemed to have been swinging wildly and missing. MPEG-4 video that looked great on my desk top ended up with the voice out of sync with the moving lips.

Before going about it again, I sought out (via the Oracle) suggested settings for getting good quality video out of YouTube (you definitely want something bigger than 320×24o since YT makes it bigger. I found what looked like reliable info from the YouTube Community Forums — Here’s Help for Perfect YouTube HD Video Settings!

“Perfect” would be nice, my standards are not quire that high.

So for the latest video in my previous post, these are the settings I ran through QuickTime Pro (actually via the expert settings exporting from iMovie HD):

• MPEG-4 (MP4) using H.264
• Data rate: 1411 kbits.sec
• 1280 x 720 image size
• Frame rate 25 fps
• Key Frame: automatic
• Under Video Options- Best Quality (multi-pass)
• AAC Audio, 44.1 kHz, 128 kbps

This brought my 76 second video in at 13.9 Mb!

I don’t profess these to be the absolute best, Nor am I saying that there are not tools to do this work for you– but so far so good (one video!)

All the video/app/being-on-the-net-anywhere fun of the iPhone comes at a cost- the limits of its battery life. And yes, you cannot carry a spare. Since I have some long distance travel I’ve been interested in some for the battery boosters for the iDevices. I was almost ready to go for the Richard Solo device– it appears in a lot of the magazines, but in late April I heard on engadget about the mophie juice pack air– it is a battery source of extra power that is built into a plastic case for the phone.

Here’s my quick little demo of it in action:

It charges up when you charge the iPhone (blue light indicators on the back show how much juice is in the juice pack). There is a standby switch so I run my iPhone battery down, then flip the mophie power on, which then recharges the iPhone. I get at least one full charge and there are still 1 or 2 lights lit up, si estimate I might get another 40% charge out of it. I do agree with what others have said the sliding the top case off the mophie is a little tricky; it seems to require some extra force, and when it doe snot nudge one begins to wonder if it will snap.

The mophie adds a little bulk to the device, but for not having to have a battery brick, its impressive. I was eager for mine, so I pre-ordered mine and paid for 2 day shipping for the April 21 launch since I was leaving the 30th for a 2 week east coast trip. Frankly I expected by pre-ordering, the thing would ship on April 21, but it was almost a week later I had not heard from them. I did email and got a very quick response from Rebecca there, and she pushed the right buttons so that it came the day before I left town.

That scored some points in my book. What I did not know for a long time is (and I am guessing) since I complained about not getting it within the time frame promised, they ended up crediting me back the entire amount I paid for it (unless they just made a billing goof). So it has been free.

One small downside is the little mini USB like hookup the mophie uses to connect to the internal connector of the iPhone- you use a special cable that has regular USB on the other end so you can charge it from a computer or from the standard iPhone plug charger. This does mean I cannot power it in my car, where I have a cigarette lighter attachment to a standard iPhone dock. I could charge it by yanking it out of the mophie case.

The other thing is that the little mini USB port on the mophie might be fragile– probably because I had mistakenly got the mini USB plug in upside down, I managed to dislodge the plug from the inside, and once loose it became detached and in essence, the mophie was dead and could not get a charge. If you scan the comments in the c|net review of the mophie, you hear that this happens at some frequency for people.

The mophie customer support was really responsive for me, and I shipped the busted to them and got a new one in return soon after. I’m being a bit more careful with checking the cable orientation before connecting it.

All in all I am happy with the battery boost the mophie gives. I am usually putting on for travel, and going back to a basic case at home (in the car where I use it for my stereo I can just hook it to the DC power)– and more, I;ve ben happy to get good customer service, a refreshing change from the experience with other companies.

see more Lolcats and funny pictures

Sometimes your plans work even better then your wildest dreams.

I’ve started doing some Skype video interviews to collect the material for an upcoming Open Education conference presentation on Amazing Stories of Openness. In an email exchange with Leigh Blackall, I thought it could be fun to post a call for stories on YouTube and ask people to respond in video.

it seems so web 2.0ish.

I’m having problems with what looks like fine MPEG 4 video on my computer upload to YouTube and end up with the voice and video way out of sync, like the badly dubbed Godzilla movies, so here it is hoisted on my own server.

It’s still a call for responses, so please reply to the bad synced version on YouTube or post a comment here with a link to your video response. And I have to admit, I need some diversity- so far (self included) my cast mostly all white guys. C’mon ladies and folks from outside the US? But I am not picky, white guys are still welcome.

call for amazing stories (quicktime)

In my first cut of shotting the video, I used the laptop camera on my MacBookPro and spoke audio into my headset mike. The audio was pretty shabby, and started out out of sync.

So I redid my monologue, using my Flip Mino sitting on a GorillaPod. With no one at home, it was a bit of trial and error (out-takes not) to get the shot aimed right. I edited it quickly in iMovie (I am still using the 2 versions back one). I add titles, and I like to separate the audio track to I can cut and drop in some still images. I also went to ccMIxter for some background music- Happyhappyrainbows by colab.

I save mine as broadband high quality MPEG-4, which comes in at 640×480. I uploaded to YouTube, and the web version was way out of sync. I redid it at medium quality and same result. I don’t understand what YouTube is doing in the processing, but it is borked. I give up.

Sometimes, you just have to say, it ain;t gonna work, and move on.

You can also send me some details on your story via the Google Form at the bottom of http://cogdog.wikispaces.com/AmazingStories. I am really excited about the bits I got so far, and I have a fun reto idea for the presentation in Vancouver.

cc licensed flickr photo shared by misterbisson

Yep my internet grandchildren, Old CogDog remembers when e-mail was pretty much it for everything on online activity, long before junk mail, phishing, spam, twitter, facebook. blogs, heck before the web.

It;s refreshing when something nice just lands in thr box, and makes you pause and smile. Today’s gift:

Hi Alan,

I am a secretary at [Xxxxxx], and a bit of a tech geek, so I have been following your blog since you presented at our [school]. Anyway, I am sure you have already seen this, but on the off chance you haven’t…

This site will compare bing and google search results side by side.

http://www.furia.com/code/bg/bg.cgi

I picture the shy secretary secretly tweeting and blogging, and the fact that this person decided to share something forward the old fashioned way, well heck, it’s just making me smile.

As I wrote in the reply:

That is so kind of you to share, and to pull the curtain back, I do NOT see everything out there and rely on other people to share, so thanks

(and my choice of photos above is a bit slanted, I could not find a bing box, so sue me)

cc licensed flickr photo shared by cogdogblog

That keynote speaker, is he talking to me?

Yep.

In his ED-MEDIA presentation on Beyond Management: The Personal Learning Environment, slide 14, Stephen describes the process that is at the core of his activity (16,000+ posts since 2001!), which he named in honor of little ole me as ARRFF:

or Aggregate, Remix, Repurpose, Feed Forward.

Stephen was firing on all pistons, and had some great lines on the difference between complicated things and complex things, mesh networks versus star networks, the mystery of the hidden flash animation, the myth of solitary autonomy, some things about butterflies and more. You can catch the audio on his site at http://www.downes.ca/presentation/225

ARRFF! ARRFF! ARRFF! ARRFF! ARRFF! ARRFF! ARRFF! ARRFF! ARRFF! ARRFF!

I pulled out all the Hawaii in yer eye themes for the latest incarnation of my dog and dog show, presenting 50+ Web 2.0 Ways to Tell a Story for the EDMEDIA 2009 conference (all links mentioned in the show are just a scroll away from that link)

It went fine, I had fun, people laughed at the Blabberize Alpaca. There is an audio recording coming from EDMEDIA, which is going to be full of me popping my p’s a bit loudly. It was a few days before that I realized I was missing a key cultural reference:

Hawaii 50+ Ways the trailer

Going into this I felt I needed something new as an angle. ED-MEDIA is a big international conference, and swirls around the thousands of papers presented. Egads, I needed something academic?

I’m really ready to hang it up and retire the shtick. This time I tried to take a tack of emphasizing some things I suggested were more important than the tools, some things I called “the craft” and aimed to hang them on some of the examples.

• A story must clearly arc to an end, to a “punchline.”
• Distill a story down to only its most necessary elements.
• If you cannot create media, modify or re-purpose.
• Think and tell in metaphors and symbols.
• Be creative within a limited tool set.
• The act of locating media is a key craft

I did get the audience to join in the group story game where they had to contribute to the prompt:

Under a Full Moon, Last Night I Saw The Strangest Thing Happen On Waikiki Beach

(as usual) it involved Elvis singing “Blue Hawaii” and then he was dancing with a shark… someone has to wrap that one up.

And also as usualy lots of people want t know what software the presentation was done in.

“That’s the web”

and it is! It’s just images, some RSS, and the CoolIris plugin– all building on what I outlined in CoolIris as a Presentation tool. It’s a bit easier now to run your own image slide shows, even from your desktop, and Scott Leslie keeps pounding at other ways to create shows– but to me, the most powerful method is rolling your own RSS feeds since you can then define the web link for each slide. That is the reason I use CoolIris as it is nearly ideal for doing presentations about web sites because of the way it moves back and forth from presentation to web and back.

A few new wrinkles I tossed in this time:

• For candy on the eye candy, I added my own logo to the CoolIiris menu bar. Easy stuff.
• Ever since May, something changed in either CoolIris or Flash (and no one is owning up) so that my previously working FLV videos that played inside the CoolIris wall now refused to play. They just spin and spin and spin, and CoolIris is not even acknowledging this as a bug. I ran an end around by doing anormal image and link to a web page– a page I created that autoplayed my flash video in a web player- e,g, http://cogdogblog.com/stuff/50ways/hawaii-50-ways.html
• Almost by accident– yes it was an accident or a typo– I found a new CoolIris trick. The normal thing is to make a thumbnail image by making copy of the full size image but smaller dimensions II do mine as 240 pixel wide JPEGs). While testing, I had noticed that I had a thumbnail of a different image than the full size- and when played in CoolIris, you get some neat transition effects. I used it on a few slides- as shown in the video below, not sure if it comes through as an effect (or a gimmick):
  cool iris trick

A few other notes on my mad methods- I do everything to avoid the inevitable Sucky Hotel Internet. So I run my presentation in a web browser, but running locally from Apache running on my MacBookPro. That makes it run a little faster. IN addition, because of the awkward pauses while waiting for web sites to load– all of the external sites I planned to use I had pre-loaded as tabs in my browser, so all I needed to do was to minimize the CoolIris interface, and flip to the right tab.

So that was 50+ Web 2.0 Ways to Tell a Story, Hawaiian Style (pineapple and Canadian bacon??).

Book ‘em, Dominoe.

cc licensed flickr photo shared by cogdogblog

I’ve been saying that annotating maps is one of the most under-used edtech tools, given the wonderful capabilities one can do (for free) in Google MyMaps– Gmaps are more than finding driving locations to the nearest sushi bar. The fact that you can mark up anywhere in the world with information you pin on a map, is (to me) astounding, but I’m kind of a map nerd.

I’ve done a number of these maps for various reasons, but don’t always go back to them. But woah, my not so serious maps of places where people get Starbucks staff to say the word “large” (rather than foo foo ‘venti’) has like 18,000 views! That’s insane.

Open public maps are fine for projects and such, but it means that people have license to remove your description (I saw one conference map where someone placed the content they wanted in the map bubble inside my map description), and heck, look at the Starbucks map again; Jay Cross seems to have spammed it with a self promoting pin. Or he was confused. At least we know where he lives.

My new quest for the summer (at least) is reclaiming (some of) my weekend time, which has been lately filling with that gray boundary zone where work fuzzes out to the tech stuff I do on my own. So I am making more time for the offline activities, like today’s trip up to a new lake south of Flagstaff where I spent a good 2 hours paddling around in my kayak (well some of that time was sitting under a shade tree enjoying a cold beer).

But my tech genes don’t shut off completely, so I have my flickr photos posted, and tonight I was interested in starting a map with the lakes I have explored, going even back to my first dip in October 2007 when Westley Field took my paddling in the Sydney Harbour. So it did not take too much time to assemble my kayak map: I used the thumbnail size images of my flickr photos inside each pin.

View Alan’s Kayak Spots in a larger map

I still have some echoes of the excitement when I watched the Google Wave demo video on the brief but when they were co-browsing in real time, from different machines, a Google map. This still is one missing piece of maps, making them a shared social media experience.

So whats your take on maps? Where do you see people doing interesting things with them? Pinning static info on a map is obvious, but what about edgier things? I’ve been trying to suggest doing storytelling in GMap. What about a game? ARG? a treasure hunt? a puzzle? a math problem?

What’s on your map?

This is my (shameless) pitch for some material for an upcoming presentation for the August 2009 OpenEd conference… also at http://cogdog.wikispaces.com/AmazingStories

modified from an original January 1935 issue found at the archive from Galactic Central

Amazing Stories of Openness
While the Open Education movement focuses on institutional issues, a large ocean exists of powerful individual accomplishments simply from tapping into content that is open for sharing and re-use. As colorful as old covers of “Amazing Stories” magazine, this presentation shares moving, personal stories that would not have been previously possible, enabled by open licensed materials and personal networks. Beyond my own tales, others have been culled from the net, and I ask you to share your own.

While open courseware is important, there is much more that happens to us as individuals as we break old conventions and actually freely share our content online.

I want to help promote the concept of wide open sharing by highlighting examples of Amazing Stories of Openness– things that people have gained from that were initiated from putting something they made, wrote into the open space of the web, stories of things that would not have ever happened without this space.

What the heck am I talking about? My own examples include ones outlined in Only on the Web:

• An HTML tutorial I shared in the mid 1990s was voluntarily translated into Icelandic by a teacher in Isafudor, later leading to be being invited to Reykjavik to run a workshop for teachers.
• A German rock band named “The Sea Level” found an old photo in my web site of the sea level sign in Death Valley– they used it for the cover of their CD and I got a copy of it!
• During a workshop in Tasmania, Australia, I was telling the audience about the amazing thing on flickr where I had posted photos of flowers labeled “Unknown flower” and people on their own found the photo and helped identify it. I chose one at random, and the person who had commented on my photo was sitting in the room!

This is the Tom Sawyer Fence Painting School of building presentations! I’m looking for your stories to tell to an audience at the August 2009 Open Ed Conference in Vancouver. If you complete the google form below (or find it directly at http://bit.ly/amazingstories) I’ll respond ASAP and hopefully we can set up a way for you to share your story (if not I have to build a presentation around just my own stories, yecchh).

How about it? It does not have to be super amazing, it might just be a colleague you discovered via open content, or a project that happened because of commons interests, or maybe something even more amazing.

Pixton Version of this Call For Stories

Thanks!