CogBlogged from ‘March, 2005’

Come to San Diego, October 17-18 for the 2005 International Symposium on Wikis: The 2005 International Symposium on Wikis brings together wiki researchers, implementers, and users for the first time. The goal of the symposium is to find a voice for the community. The symposium has a rigorously reviewed research paper track as well as plenty of space for practitioner reports, demonstrations, and discussions. We are honored to announce that Ward Cunningham, the inventor and host of the original WikiWikiWeb, will present the opening keynote talk at WikiSym 2005. Anyone who is involved in using, researching, or developing wikis is invited to WikiSym 2005! I hope someone buys them a style sheet ;-) A big draw might be the presence of Ward Cunningham, the grandfather of all wikis.

I’m back. I think. The last two days have been technically the worst of my career. This is a long story. The bottom line is that this blog is now running on a new URL http://realgar.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/alan/ but things are forarded nicely (.htaccess redirect) so all links to http://cogdogblog.com/alan/ end up here. But that is just the last end around of a completely frustrating 32 hours. Note: I think my perl elves made some progress while I am gone. It seems like this blog is resurrected. Ignore the stuff about moving. And the timing could not have been worse. In about 9 hours I fly from sunny Phoenix to wintery frigid New York City for the League of Innovations conference followed by a trip to Boston to visit MIT. The server hijinks consumed the time I had planned to work on my presentations and the new openMLX skins. So here is [...]

Just arrived in the big city for the League for Innovation conference that starts tomorrow. Perched on the 40 something floor of the Marriot with my own commanding view of Manhattan. About 1/3 the plane from Phoenix was loaded with folks from Maricopa, almost like a chartered jet. Sometimes you have to travel to a different city to interact with your own colleagues. One of them, Rich, is a New York native, and led us on his preferred transport mode from JFK via the AirTrain and the E train subway. There is nothing quite like the human spectacle of the subway… until you emerge to the human spectacle of the street. From a very suburban city like Phoenix, the crush and density of New York is like being transported to some entirely new dimension. Its exciting and strange all at once. Woo-hoo, well, later time for bloggin’, it’s time to [...]

Look out for your RSS– as warned the vultures are still circling, and maybe hovering closer to your feeds. It’s interesting, curious, and quirky when the PR factories roll new verbs off the assembly line- Moreover’s FeedRSSDirect Ads offer this savory description: Moreover Technologies, the premier provider of aggregated online current awareness information, today announced FeedDirect RSS Ads, the first self-service integrated RSS feed delivery and monetization service… RSS feed publishers will now benefit from the ability to insert content-targeted, revenue-generating sponsored links within posts or as an individual post, providing publishers with unparalleled flexibility to monetize their content. Ohhhhhhhh, “monetizing” the content sounds so sexy. Magical. Alchemy. Turning plain old content into cash. I am not predicting gloom and doom, and will likely exercise my right not to read content that has been created in the pure goal of “monetization”. It’s bad enough that in this pursuit some web [...]

I am not sure yet what to make of wists – visual bookmarks, yet another variant following the flickr del.icio.us trail through the mountain pile of folksonomic tag mania. Create a wist account, load a browser bar tool, and when you are surfing and want to track a site in your “collection” (a del.icio.us task), wist offers to create an icon based on any image it can find in the page (quasi flickr-like). Slap on some tags, and see where your tags lead you. There is a friend of a friend thing there too, but I lack friends (apparently). You end up with a collection of tagged icons representing sites you have “wisted”. Since it syndicates, this is another one in the pack of Rip. Mix. Feed. I am wisting but I have no idea what I am doing.

I am supposed to be out the door about 5 minuntes ago when I get to curious to click on vimeo (tip of the blog hat to David Weinberger, thanks for making me later for dinner ;-) In a nutshell, it looks like a filckr for video, and it semms there are a lot of other folks moving “theirmedia” in this direction. What caught my attentions was that vimeo is taking tags applied to video clips, and assembling them dynamically into QuickTime flicks, such as the concert movies vimeo show. Ironically I had suggested something like this in the early pow-wows last summer when we met as the advisory board for the 2005 New Media Consortium Horizon project. My idea was not exactly what vimeo shows in tis beta, but I thought of something like a wiki for video content- where one could collaboratively mix and match and edit video [...]

I like Skype. I like Skype. I like it so much, I wanted to run it on my PC laptop across the desk from me. What I did not like was when I logged in with the account I use on my Mac, I notice that my contacts do not appear, so it seems that they are not stored centrally (like AIM, ICQ), but on my computer. This means that should I get a new computer, want to run this elsewhere, my contacts do not go with me. They need to be re-entered, re-authorized?? Tell me it isn’t so? Maybe I am missing the forest for a bamboo stick in front of my face, or I missed an obvious button menu item. It would hardly be the first time. Nope, it’s a FAQ, Jack, in Using Skype: You can log in to Skype from multiple computers, but you won’t have [...]