CogBlogged from ‘December, 2003’

No addresses or URLs have been shuffled, but today I finally managed to move our ‘Jade’ server (if anyone has caught notice, all machines in my area are domain named after minerals… my G4 laptop is ‘Topaz’, my beige PC is “Pyrite’, there is an old Mac named ‘Sphalerite’ acting as a mulit-user server for some old shockwave apps that people seem to still use) to our new, sleek X-Serve host. I had elegant plans for a migration that included an Apache redirecting requests for our RSS 2 JS feed machine to a mirror on a spare server (‘Realgar”, yet another mineral!), and a temporary “hold on” message for all other requests…. but somehow I lost track of the root admin password on the old server. Just as well, the migration part was about 20 minutes, and the old Linux server was taken offline in the harshest fashion — pulling [...]

This slow time has allowed a rare luxury: finishing a good book. On one forgotten trip a few months back, thumbing through the schlock selections at some airport bookstore, one caught my attention because of a geology cross-section on the cover. Simon Winchester’s “The Map that Changed the World” is the riveting story of William Smith, truly the “father of modern geology.” (Michelle hopefully has a copy ;-)

Just announced, Jan 21-22, 2004, RSS Winterfest: a free Webcast, and hear from some of the world’s foremost experts and commentators about RSS and the future of Internet content syndication. We’ll give an overview of RSS and look at its future. We’ll feature case studies that will examine the applications for enterprise content syndication. We’ll hear what some of the early adopters have learned about distributing advertising through RSS feeds. Kudos to the planners for taking on the tools of the topic (blogs, RSS, and wikis too) for the format of this event. Dave Winer is the kickoff speaker, the rest of the speaker crew is a mix of z lot of corporate types and other well known digerati. Anyhow, it is free, so sign up. Is Dave buying beer?

Time for a break- this CogDog is off at our secret hideaway, tethered to the net only by a 28 kbps modem line. At that rate, the RSS reader chokes and sputters on those fat feeds, bloated graphic web sites are not worth the bother, and those internal emails full of attached Word files or crufted HTML with 1 Mb TIFFs are not worth reading… indeed, time for a break. Yes, it all suggests better things to be done than being online. Back in action Dec 30. I hope all enjoy a festive holiday season everywhere, relax, and come back inspired to rev things up, blog incessantly, wiki like mad, pump up our Maricopa Learning eXchange… That’s my plan, at least. Yes, this dog is off to play…

Now that the copies of our mcli Forum have gone out to our colleges, we are getting a lot of interest, questions, head scratching about RSS from the “Pssss… Have You Heard About RSS?” article. An email came today from one of our Governing Board members who found the article “interesting”– this is remarkable and encouraging all at the same time. I think this person got so excited that they went online to RSS.com and wondering why our article never mentioned “Retail Store Systems” (Wow, yet another RSS acronym!). I will be providing this person a personal tour of RSS (the other kind) very soon. RSS is very, very new around our system, and actually few have yet grasped its potential. But hey a year ago I was in the same boat!

There are a few threads to this story. I had seen an odd thing on one of our new XHTML designed web sites– this one uses an HTML <ul> list and CSS for rollover effects and graphic-looking buttons for the navigation. In Internet Explorer 6 (and then reports came in for IE5 users) the text to the right of the 4 first navigation links was hidden, or the text would disappear of you moused over one of the navigation links. The text would show up if you scrolled down and came back. I Googled a bit on “IE CSS bug” scoured some CSS listservs and came up with some things that sounded related but were different situations. I then added “+disappear” to my Google search query and came up with 2 links that were a bit closer to my situation… but one of these sites had a link to an [...]

Although I miss the literary references, I do like the spin that Jason Kotke puts on meta-data: Nothing takes the fun and personality out of writing like metadata. As software developers, photographers, writers, and users struggle to organize creative work so that people can locate what they’re after, the work itself has necessarily been de-emphasized. As an example, posts on weblogs can have categories, permalinks, post dates, post times, # of comments, # of new comments since your last visit, # of words, # of trackbacks, who last commented on a post, titles, authors, icons, prompts to read more, karma scores, # of versions, “email this” links, referers, and all sorts of other things: His graphic of a data encrusted blog post of no significance is worth a look. If your blog looks like this, then it may be time to think about writing, contextualizing, contributing something other than a [...]

There are people who can look at a peaceful valley or serene mountain vista and only see how it can be exploited; they see only golf courses, shopping malls, and asphalt. Likewise, there are those that can only look at a useful communications technology and only rub their hands in glee trying to figure out how to squeeze money from it. There was the glory of the web, and now we have non-stop pop-up ads. There was direct connections via email, and now we are littered by spam. Next stop? The vultures are beginning to hover over RSS. Witness David Galbraith’s: “How to make RSS commercially viable” RSS, or more generally, web based syndication, appears to be hitting critical mass, but where is the money? Despite the promise of metadata enriched syndicated content, RSS is usually no more than a way to syndicate a link and a headline. No large [...]

Blog on Blogs, a Weblog Review does double duty as a great resource for getting a handle on weblogs and a wonderful example of using blogs in an educational context, a New Media Studies course: This project is collaboration produced by the students of the Fall 2003 Introduction to New Media Studies course at Richard Stockton College of New Jersey. The purpose of the project is to provide concise reviews of examples of several different “genres” of weblogs. Seeded with a visit by weblog scholar Dr. Jill Walker, Blog on Blogs outlines the nine factors that instructor Scott Rettberg had his students frame their “blogged” reviews of other weblogs: Indentity, Design, Content, Time, Linking, Blog Roll, Inbound Links, Discussion/Comments, and Audience Analysis. The students’ blog reviews are organized into categories of ‘Classic Bloggers’, Comics Blogs’, ‘Digital Culture Blogs’, ‘Fiction/Writer Blogs’, ‘Food Blogs’, ‘Group Blogs’, ‘Persona Blogs’, ‘Photoblogs’, ‘Political Blogs’, and [...]

No centerfolds but… for those that enjoy the history of how the Net unfolded, if you could not get enough of “Where the Wizards Stayed Up Late” (a great read by the way), check out “The Faces in Front of the Monitors”– this is an alphabet listing of those wizards, many with multiple photos. This is on a site labeled “White Hat-Black Hat-Grey Hat, a reference to hacker jargon for bad guys, good guys, and the grey area in between (well at least that is what Amazon.com inside book searching got me) So if you have an aching curiosity to see who the players were on the BBN IMP Team (and you should!), check ‘em out (scary beards). Or maybe you are craving an icon of ARPANet team and internet visionary, J.C.R. Licklider, check ‘em out.. Or maybe you can find your geek hero at an almost teen age persona, [...]