CogBlogged from ‘August, 2005’

On the first leg of my flight from Phoenix to Aspen, I’ve listened to Malcolm Gladwell’s ITConversations podcast on Human Nature. Author of the popular Blink and Tipping Point books, Malcolm Gladwell seems in voice to to find a great way to bring about data, research, and human nature to an interesting place. In this session he is talking about mistakes organizations made by doing extensive field tests of new products (Herman Miller’s Aeron chairs, New Coke, making strategic decisions based on these tests, only to find in execution, they are dead wrong for how people really feel. The Aeron chair, Herman Miller’s most successful and profitable chair, was meticulously designed to address a wide array of office chair problems (you would be amazed at how complex a simple chair and its use is). In their test with people who should be attracted (modern designers)– it was disliked consistently. The [...]

I’ve got time on my hands in the Phoenix Airport. My short flight in the small commuter jet to Aspen is delayed because… ahem.. one of the crew has now shown up yet. Yikes. Beyond munching on over priced food that one does not really need, and not wanting to read your magazine not wanting to finish it and just lug it on the plane, what’s there to do? Just watch people. It’s America’s favorite unclaimed past-time, raised to its highest art form on the New York subway where the trick is to watch without anyone really noticing you are watching. For this observation, I need not my eyes. Thumbing through a discarded newspaper, I hear at least three times a nearby cell phone go off. It’s ready loud. And the tone is like a loud Spanish matador flourish. It’s just so silly and I cannot imagine what it says [...]

Just found Yet Another Social Bookmark Tool- BlinkList offers site marking and tagging: BlinkList is a tool that allows you to create a mental map of the internet of sites that are important to you. It’s a bookmarking manager designed to work in the same way your brain stores data and thinks about things. When we launch the full version in Oct 2005 BlinkList will be the most powerful bookmark manager in existence. To boldly go where no bookmark manager has gone before! To Infinity and Beyond! Yup, this makes number 17 of the bookmark sites available on the Make Your Own Multipost Bookmarklet Tool. How many are in your wallet?

Whew! The guys down in the power department apparently flicked the switch on for Maricopa’s internet connection, (though email is still pending, but who the spam pile?). Wow, almost 28 hours without blogging, I almost have the shakes ;-) While the blog was down, I came across the wildly dynamic Vox Delicii , Michal Migurski’s creation that in near realtime pulls from the del.icio.us “most poular” tagged sites and provides a visual representation of sites people are marking the most: The stripes you see at top are a near-realtime cumulative view of popular sites posted to the Del.icio.us social bookmarking service… organized by date and popularity. The size of each color chip refers to the relative amount of coverage an item has received on Del.icio.us Popular on a given day, based on hourly samples… The color refers to relative growth or decay on that day – an item that has [...]

For some long lost reason, I was looking at my first WordPress entry from April 2005, following the easy and recommended migration from MovableTyoe. First I had not responded to the comment about updating my Feedburner settings. Well, 4 months later, and I sprung into action, updating the blog URL, and making sure my links were now coming from del.icio.us rather than furl. I’ve tagged it into my WP templates, but my feed at http://feeds.feedburner.com/cogdogblog is now up to date. The other topic I never mentioned was dealing with the 2+ years of old entries at CogDogBlog 1.0. When I did my migration research, there were alot of methodologies for the migrate in place, where one tries to replicate all of the old Movable Type URLs into the new site, so there are no lost links. My strategy was different. I left the old blog as is, although I did [...]

In the next few months I will be trying to… ahem, dip into the cliche bag…. “walk some of the talk” (or maybe it is “jog some of the blog”). My colleagues and I concocted a plan last week to cease completely the print publication of our mcli Forum, a once a semester publication form our fofice on teaching, learning, and assessment. The forum has been pumped out since 2001, and actually before that in a previous incarnation as the Labyrinth-Forum back to 1992 (for a trip down memory lane, see our August 1994 issue on “Mosaic of Internet”). So yes, while we have been electronically publishing all along, the primary focus has been on the print version, resulting in these issues for us: We spend a lot of money on print versions. A lot of bucks, although we use a reaonble priced paper, limited colors, grey scale photos… In [...]

Over at Learning Circuit Blogs, Clark Aldrich pulls out the stereotyping brush and paints large swaths of badly mixed paint in “Schools hate businesses, businesses hate schools”. I will not even dignify it with a pull quote, but please jump in on the comments and send the guy some light as he is lost. Yechhh. I gotta go rinse out my computer with some spam.

A conversation overheard in my inbox as Thuunderbird chomped through the latest flux of meaningful email: Filters: “Smell that?… Do you smell that?” InBox: “What.” Filters: “Spam, son. Nothing else in the world smells like that… I love the smell of spam in the morning… Ya know, that gasoline smell… It smells like… victory.” Just what positive overall cosmic good is coming from this? I’m not smelling victory.

I only spent 15 minutes at FeedDigest “Making Your Feeds Fabulous” but its got a whole lot of “oompf” potential if you are trying to do more with using multiple feed sources. More or less, you create a “digest” that you can then mix in a few RSS feeds, and Feed Digest provides a whole raft of ways you can re-use the mixed up content. Somebody up north may want to crank up their aggressiveness ;-) Inside joke. Not feeling very creative, I whopped up a CogDogBlogest a mix of my WordPress blog feed, my del.icio.us feed, and my flickr feed. Ho hum. I get a RSS URL: http://app.feeddigest.com/digest3/VGE7KGLMJ8.rss But there are ways to customize the output with some pre-made and editable templates… and you can then resyndicate to your own sites using JavaScript, PHP, and some other tools.

I’m trying to give James a hand at bumping up the number of new sites at Edublogs.org by a factor of 10. I emailed a message to our distribution list for our Ocotillo Online Learning Group letting them new this was available. I’ve heard more people talk about, or actually try blogging in all of the last two years, its like sitting on an inflection point. The basic message was: Do you hear more and more people are talking about blogging? Don’t know where to start? If the word and practice is strange, start by looking at Will Richardson’s Weblogg-ed (http://www.weblogg-ed.com/) If you are curious enough and want a free place to practice and try it out, see the new hosted service Edublogs.org (http://edublogs.org) offering free service for educators. You can create your own unique URL like http://elvis.edublogs.org/ and have the use of one of the better blog software platforms, [...]