CogBlogged from ‘August, 2005’

If you hear things repeated enough and from different sources, they grow into self truths, and next thing you know you help to spread them. In a week it is an Urban Legend. It’s interesting to see how some new tools can help poke holes in folk tales. Have you ever repeated the old adage that “the Great Wall in China is the only man made object visible from space”? Since something like 0.000005% of the world’s population has actually been in space, we have little to test our “truths”, but Dan Hersam took a spin on Google Maps to show that the Great Wall is not visible from space: I’ve heard from several different people that the Great Wall of China was the only man-made object visible from space. I heard it so many times that I became convinced of its veracity, and having not had the opportunity to [...]

No Need to Click Here – I’m just claiming my feed at Feedster Update: WTF with Feedster? I’ve had an account there since they’ve been out but their “MyFeedster” interface is acting like bad alpha software- the change password form uses Text input fields rather than password types, it does not process the change request, it does not remember that I have already logged in, and it refuses to accept a 75px square JPEG image file as an icon. I expected better…

Can the level of tasteless go any further down the crapper? This is “reality”? Yikes. I’m saving my pennies to purchase an uninhabited South Pacific island, off the grid. Good luck to the rest of you.

Worth more than the banner “2 Cents Worth”, David Warlick muses on Four Reasons Why the Blogsphere Might Make a Better Professional Collaborative Environment than Discussion Forums: I have been experimenting a good bit lately with integrating some of the emerging web tools (blogs, wikis, rss, podcasting, etc.) into my presentations and workshops, attempting to expand the scope and dimension of these events. For most of my presentations at NECC, I used a wiki page for my online handouts, enabling participants to come in after the presentation (or during if we’d had WiFi in the presentation rooms) and add their own insights on the topics. Some of the wiki pages also aggregated web links from my Del.icio.us account and related external blog articles written by participants after the session (and by colleagues before the session). This was accomplished by tying in with Technorati’s ability to generate RSS feeds based on [...]

flickr foto Cool Dogavailable on my flickr Possible new logo? To answer Cadu’s request, I’m starting a new tag game– find photos of signs featuring dogs, and tag them with dogsign (and might as well tag them dog as well to beef up the canine tag rankings). What could make a better logo than a dog? There must be a few hundred thousand signs out there featuring doggie logos! Play tag with us!

flickr foto Cadu On Alertavailable on my flickr What? Did I hear that cats beat us dogs in the FlickrTagFight? I cannot believe it! Something must be done! More dog tags! More dog tags! More DOG tags! “This cat tag thing is out of control! I say upload your dog photos en masse and show these cats who’s on top! What are you watching me for? Get out there and tag dog photos!”

The first rule of FlickrTagFightClub is we do not talk about FlickrTagFightClub… nah, talk about it. Blog about it. See FlickrTagFight, a site that lets you compare two tags, side by side, head to head, in a knock down, winner take all tag fight– see how “Man vs Machine”: And it’s not even close! Machines lose by a landslide, a TKO! Yet, we must dispute the cat vs dog results: Sure, if you go by sheer numbers, the felines squeak out a win, but just look at those images- do you really think the cats take on the dogs? More flickr frivolty– interesting, maybe not of major intrinsic value, but again showing the power of opening up system APIs to the creative minds out here… So, what tags will you set up to fight? Tip of the blog hat to ResearchBuzz

Good News: Google News and custom searches are available as RSS/Atom Feeds. Bad News: Has anyone at Google actually googled the RSS 2.0 formats? They have taken a weird approach to the format, double listing the title and publication date items inside the description! Okay, technically it meets RSS 2.0 rules, but functionally, it is doing things differently from feeds than we expect. Let’s say I am keep tabs on news about squirrels, I get these results. Good enough. But if you look at the actual RSS 2.0 feed content, you see: <item>   <title>   Greedy squirrel trapped by nuts – CBBC newsround (audio)   </title>   <link>   http://news.bbc.co.uk/cbbcnews/hi/newsid_4140000/         newsid_4146200/4146228.stm   </link>   <pubDate>Fri, 12 Aug 2005 15:08:00 GMT</pubDate>   <description>   <br><table border=0 width= valign=top cellpadding=2 cellspacing=7>   <tr><td valign=top>   <a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/cbbcnews/hi/newsid_4140000/         newsid_4146200/4146228.stm">Greedy <b>squirrel</b> trapped        by nuts</a><br><font size=-1><font color=#6f6f6f>CBBC newsround         (audio),&nbsp;UK&nbsp;-</font> <nobr>   10 hours ago</nobr></font><br><font size=-1>A <b>squirrel</b   after scoffing too many nuts. The bushy-tailed thief had [...]

I rarely listen to the radio anymore, about as much as I can endure is some public radio during the morning commute, and I have not listened to a music station in eons. So since I have been enjoying my iPod Shuffle, I’ve been curious about options to use it as a player in my vehicle. The Shuffle did work well in the VW Beetle with one of those cassette tape player attachments, but the only problem is that a few months ago, my wife and swapped vehicles, just for some variety sake, so now I have the mid 1990s Nissan Pickup (so unattractive with its hood of primer color I will not post flickr photos) which has a CD player but no cassette deck. Having heard mixed reviews of the FM transmitter devices (audio output plugged into them is sent to an unused station on your car radio), I [...]

“Email listservs are the place on the internet for lively and active online communities…” well, it was something I might have said in 1989, 1992, or even 1995. Pondering where listservs are now, I quickly reached for a dinosaur metaphor, but felt that is rather cliche, so I dud around WikiPedia and found the story of the Quagga, an extinct variety of the zebra. But how is the Quagga relevant? A recent discussion of “blogs vs lists” on the ITForum list reinforced the reason just why 2 years ago I dropped every listserv subscription once I found I get much more information, more quickly, from a wider variety of sources, make more professional (and interesting) connections via the blog-space and RSS. But the discussion on ITForum caught me off guard by some very naive to off-base (IMHO) opinions of blogs. Today I posted: Wow. I’ve not read ITForum in a [...]