CogBlogged from ‘September, 2005’

I gotta stop blogging and do some work… but then Stephen Downes has to share this nifty tool from PubSub– LinkRank: LinkRanks are our way of measuring the strength, persistence, and vitality of links appearing in sites that syndicate their content. When PubSub reads an entry from a syndication feed, it takes note of any URLs (technically, URIs) it sees. PubSub users can then utilize this link data when creating subscriptions to better express what they’re looking for. PubSub monitors millions of feeds. By generating a list of all the URLs contained in entries of each feed, it’s possible to determine a site’s relevance just from the number of incoming links it has. LinkRank goes one step further and calculates a score for each linking site. Sites are then scored based on the score of the sites that link to them. So the CogDogBlog LinkRank gives me a whole raft [...]

While thinking/writing today about visual navigation schemes, I transported back to the late 1990s when the brilliant multimedia visionary Roy Stringer was coming up with a 3D, manipulative tool called a “Navihedron”, then coded in Macromedia Shockwave. You see this in some modern iterations, especially the Visual Thesaurus, where words become nodes, and are connected to related words, visually mapped as a 3D objects you could move around on screen. I had been following this since at the time most of my media projects were shockwave based. The stuff Roy was doing with R&D in multimedia interfaces at Amaze in the U.K was… amazing. I got to hear him speak when then-Chancellor Paul Elsner brought him to Maricopa, where Stringer was hinting at a project of working with another genius, Stephen Hawking, on trying to turn Hawking’s ideas into visual manipulatives. There is a vague reference to this in one [...]

Woogle uses Google Image search to turn phrases into pictures: Woogle is a search toy based on the ever popular Google Image Search. It creates image messages out of the words in the phrase you entered. The URLs are obfuscated so that you can pass them to your friends without them being able to read the message till they view the page. We hope you enjoy passing cryptic image messages! So for example, we could play some rebus like games… what is the message: Stumped? Well woogle-link it! Now this is fine and silly, but maybe there are some creative ways to come up with a string of images and have your students test their interpretation of it. One thing, Woogle seems to always use the same image for a word… must be the top result. So dog always gets you the same cartoon where I think the yellow labrador [...]

I’ve been asking around in come email circles for any leads in software that might allow a mortal faculty member and his/her students to create 3D mind/concept maps… One reply was not relevant, but shared the link to Liveplasma a rather interesting social software / music+movies connection mapping web application. I only played with it briefly, but you can search movies or music by artist, and Liveplasma generates some node and connector maps that display works by the artist, connections to others, and some sort of visual reference that indicates it’s popularity (I think it has to do with what members mark as “favorites”. My quick exploration was extremely surficial but interesting…

For some unknown reason, I was cleaning up my browser bookmark tools. I cannot even remember where I found this, but I had forgotten about one that grabs images from any web page in view, and allows you to then upload any of them to your own flickr account. Going beyond the knee jerk fear/reaction of people lifting images from other web sites, it struck me as a nice way to combine your own web pages, and quickly add/archive them to your flickr site– this is surely more efficient than saving local copies, and uploading them from your hard drive. Since I was just Jackalop-ing around in a previous post, I visited my own web page featuring the prong-horned bunny, and clicked the flickr-it bookmark. This yanks all the images from the page, and I can then upload any of them to flickr in one quick click. Upon upload, it [...]

As a Canadian wanna-be, I’ve jumped early to register for the Feb 10-11, 2006 Northern Voice conference in Vancouver. This definitely fits the bill of an active, not-a-lecture-format conference as opposed to the other edtech fetes that just bore me into a coma. I was envious to only read of last year’s first offering. I plan to be representing the Canadian Province of Arizona proud home of the wild Jackalope:

Over on the Learning Circuits Blog, David Lee just posted Blogging by The Numbers about attempts to draw some meaningful data out of this Blogger hosted blog (since Blogger provides no data, he is using the add-ons from SiteMeter and Bravenet. He then asks: * Are there metrics you see as key when looking at a blog? * Do you know of any benchmarking sources for blog metrics? * Do you track metrics for your blog? If so, care to swap info with LCB? To be honest, “metrics” mean nothing to me when looking at a blog… I have my own, instinctual metrics of looking at the value of the content, the tone of the writer, the frequency and usefulness of what is written, a sense of whether other people read this blogger. When technorati works, one could say it provides some sort of metric culled from the linking patterns [...]

Spam for breakfast, spam, for lunch, servings of spam keep coming at all times. Yummy, yummy spam. And it is so personal and it speaks to me: Subject: Gastroenterology Opportunity From: “Xxxxx Xxxxx” <xxxxxx@xxxx.com> Date: Wed, 28 Sep 2005 13:21:30 -0400 To: “XX List” <xxxx@xxx.com> Hello Doctor, How are you? I understand that you are interested in discussing practice opportunities. I represent an outstanding practice opportunity in a major city on the East Coast. This is to join one of the top hospitals in the state and U.S., have an academic appointment, practice in a wonderful, collegial environment and live in one of the top cities in the U.S. If this would be of interest, please give me a call to 1-888-xxx-xxxxx and I will be happy to discuss it with you. While it is nice to not to be offered to enlarge/shrink body parts I am or may not [...]

Just as pleasant as the Sonoran desert flowers that unexpectedly pop up in the Spring, comes a new blog from our Paradise Valley Community College– the Student Life Blog is not about personal “diaries”, but provides regularly updated program information from the college’s Student Life Center, including upcoming events at the PVCC Coffeehouse, photos, leadership programs… and what is very cool, are some podcasts (nice that the listings give a “table of contents” of segments in each podcast)! This is such a wonderful break of business as usual here where the main way that information seems to be shared about these activities are lavishly decorated HTML email messages. There seems to be around 10-20 of these per week for various events around the system– and there is no archiving, no searching, no record once an email is trashed. So Bravo, to the Student Life group at Paradise Valley for putting [...]

Waiting for the overdue return of my dead iBook and dealing with un-acceptable ways to get an update is truly testing my n ager management. It has been 18 days since it was left in their care, which is what 5-7 business days translates as. In summary of what AppleCare does not provide is: (1) I cannot check the status of my repair online (because I took it to a store) (2) I cannot check the status via their stupid phone menu (because I lack a case/dispatch number, it does not like my repair number, apparently due to number 1) The only way I can even get close is to call the Apple Store, wade through the messages about how great and popular iPod nanos are, wait for a human to answer, wait while they put me on hold. Once I made the mistake of pressing the button for “check [...]