CogBlogged from ‘March, 2004’

The New Media Consortium Spring 2004 Online Conference was come and gone this week. I am still favorable of the format, and its mix of streaming presentations, asynchronous discussions, and live chat sessions- most online conferences throw so many sessions and event son the pile that you get overloaded. The NMC ones have had a nice balance, though the participation in this recent one was much less active than the first one in October 2003. Anyhow, my keynote on “Mysteries Revealed! Inside the Maricopa Learning eXchange” was there, it turned out to be a 52 minute guided tour of the MLX by that energetic tour guide, Biff Cantrell. I am thinking now it was way long, but I wanted to represent all of the facets and features inside and around the MLX, from our promotion efforts, to IP issues, from hardware to software, from TrackBack to RSS. That is the [...]

It’s been a while since I posted about those smelly blog spam cock roaches… mainly because the MTBlacklist Plugin has been quietly running in the background. However, in the last two days the number and frequency of blogspam has picked up. You can identify them quite easily when the comments are emailed to you– especially if the body of the comment is: Nice Post! The tell-tale is the effort to place URLs to un-wanted sites (and DO NOT CLICK and VISIT any of those URLs)… what these cretins are trying to do is to increase their Google Ranking by spreading links on other pages. The MTBlacklist allows one click de-spamming, removal of the bad comment, and adding the URL to the Blacklist for future protection. It had been a while since I went to the Comment Spam Clearninghouse and added the Latest Master Blacklist file to our Blacklist and Woah [...]

My work commute is not much more than 10 miles, but invariably during that morning stretch I witness at least once, someone tossing their cigarette butts out the car window. Maybe it is a lot of pent up frustration since the number of public places available for their habits is shrinking, and maybe so far that the last refuge is their car. News flash- the world is certainly not your ash tray. But one of these days when I am bicycle commuting I dream of the day it happens next to me at a stop light, so I can bend down, pick up the smoldering butt and toss it back in their car. “Excuse me, but you seemed to have dropped something important!” I would say with a smile. Not likely! considering how many drivers in Phoenix not only are talking on the phone while driving, but more likely, are [...]

Just like my bookmarks, for a while I have noticed (and done little) about the discrepencies of the RSS feeds I have on my work and home computers. So in the contnued spirit of the work of Brian “Housecleaning” Lamb, I devoted some time to cleaning up the doghouse. Mainly this was exporting my feeds from NetNewsWire from both machines as “OPML” file formats ( the outlining format/standard used well by RSS aggregators, and doing some manual combining of them into the “official” CDB feed (cdb.opml). This is also what gets indexed by the Share Your OPML site (which is trés cool way of looking at different slices of RSS feeds) But again,. taking a cue from Brian, I went to my Bloglines account which I had not used much, at all (and wow, lots of new features!), wiped it clean, and was able to in one click, import my [...]

Some interesting attempts at clustering or building maps of web search results (tip of the blog hat to EduResources). I cannot say I have found either of these more intuitive, but they are interesting. Mooter is beta, but not bad. It sports a Google-like search engine (though there is no information or explanation what “mooter” is or does). A search result displays your query in the center of a map, with clusters of related terms around it, and clicking on the cluster essentially yields a Google-like list of results, though now a cluster is more refined than your original search. For example I ran a query on “learning object” (It looks like you can copy/paste the URLs of search results, but this seems to fail due to a session variable) and you get this “map”

Niiiiiiiice. I have been mildly using Furl because I tend to bookmark things on my home computer I end up needing at work, and on my work computer I end up needing at home. Call it Murphy’s law of bookmarks. Furl does this with little fuss, just a bookmarklet link. I thought I had noticed that Brian had added a Furl section to his navbar, and sure enough, Furl offers RSS feeds. Very cool. I could not be out done, so plunked a Furl-ed Bar to the mess on the right of this blog front door. Yes, Brian, some house cleaning is in order. Some other day.

Last Friday’s Ocotillo Online Learning Group meeting was the first announcement and access provided to a new experimental electronic portfolio service we are hosting. This is a new installation of the software developed at Chandler-Gilbert Community College– we have set up this new server so that faculty form our other colleges could explore the potential of this new tool. Our Maricopa eP is running as a virtual host on the same Apple XServe running a handful of MT blogs, the

This morning was the release of my keynote on “Mysteries Revealed! Inside the Maricopa Learning eXchange” at the New Media Consortium Spring 2004 Online Conference. This turned out to be a 52 minute Breeze presentation, weighing in at a 70.5 Mb in authored PowerPoint, but a streaming 15 Mb via Breeze delivered Flash. At 9:30 Am PST was the scheduled audio teleconference, which is a little of an odd format because the call in participants hear me via the audio telephone bridge, but post questions via the conference chat, and host Larry Johnson relayed them to me. Actually it kind of works well, and was a fast 30 minutes. The audio has been posted to the conference site. It was good to see some new names and institutions listed in the chat area. I am guessing, but maybe there was disappointment that my vague reference to “franchising” was not the [...]

Of course you can pick up a $20 bag at OfficeMax for your laptop, and end up with the same one as every other cheapskate on the plane playing solitaire on with their ThinkPad, with zippers that bust, too many stupid pockets, and just no protection for your investment of several hundred/thousand bucks. On the flip side, I have just purchased my second beautiful RacerX from Waterfield Designs, the first was for my personal iBook and the new one for my G4 laptop at work. These bags are elegantly and smartly designed, as they have been crafted for use by San Francisco bike messengers (the RacerX has a grip that feels like a rugged Mountain Bike grip). The computer compartment is way padded to keep your laptop secure from major bumps and bangs. Yeah a WaterField bag will set you back more, but why lug around a $1500 machine in [...]

Set up a feedback form on your web site, and you get cruft like: I am a marketer and am interested in buying the e-mail addresses of all your community colleges. Sure! Your odds are as good as a July blizzard in Phoenix. At least this spam merchant was direct.