CogBlogged from ‘October, 2005’

Even with podcasting being well over a year old, I am not subscribing to any particular feeds– I’ve not really found a source from where I want that much content. I had not even loaded any onto my Shuffle for the last 2-3 months. When I do listen, I am doing it the old fashioned way, downloading a select MP3 and moving it my pod manually (after hauling a sled of coal 5 miles through snow to get to my computer). On my Sunday run, however, I took a break form tunes, and listened to two podcasts from EDUCAUSE’s coverage of their big annual conference/carnival: A Conversation with Brian Lamb, mainly because Brian is a colleague, friend, and always phrases things in a low-key but practical, slightly sarcastic manner. His interview even foreshadowed what I wrote about blog commenting, when he refered to the “intoxicating high” of a blogger’s change [...]

Where else but the internet could this happen? More than a year ago, I got an email from someone in Germany working with a music group called “Sea Level”. They had somehow managed to find this photo I had lumped somewhere in an old photo directory: This photo was taken in Death Valley California with one of those ancient 35mm cameras back in 1988. As a grad student in geology, I drove through here a few times on my way to see the famous Bishop Tuff. The car is a long gone 1973 Ford Maverick, the vehicle I drove from Maryland out to Arizona when I moved here in ’87. Anyhow, they asked me if they could use the photo for the CD they were recording. “Sure, why not?” I responsded… since they image they had found was an old scanned image not at optimal quality, I dug through my [...]

Alex Tew, 21, want to go to college, so he is earning it one pixel at a time on The Million Dollar Home Page: The idea is simple: to try and make $1m (US) by selling 1,000,000 pixels for $1 each. Hence, ‘The Million Dollar Homepage”. The main motivation for doing this is to pay for my degree studies, because I don’t like the idea of graduating with a huge student debt. I know people who are paying off student loans 15-20 years after they graduated. Not a nice thought! So, everyone is welcome to buy my pixels, which are available in 100-pixel ‘blocks’ (each measuring 10×10 pixels). You will see the homepage is divided into 10,000 of these 100-pixel blocks (hence there are 1,000,000 pixels in total). The reason for selling them in 100-pixel blocks is because anything smaller would be too small to display anything meaningful. You can [...]

I’ve not been blogging.. much. On the other hand, something that was always utterly fascinating to me is the concept of “comment blogging”, someone who has no self-published blogs, but actively participates and ‘exists’ more distributed-like in the comment space of other people’s blogs. Often, I have found this to be a missing piece of the pie in blog discussions- there is a lot of emphasis on the blog software, the features, the templates, the “rules” for publishing, writing, feeding, etc, all focused on “my blog” but less so in a key aspect of blogging- interacting and contributing in the activities on other people’s sites, hence “Blogging is a Social Process”. Now that was a nice thought when written 2 years ago, now we deal with blog comment spam, and I am disappointed to find blogs where I cannot comment back. I understand the decision, but still do not like [...]

While updating one of our projects and searching for web links to a mentioned organization, I came across a site proudly displaying this lovely disclaimer: Needless to say, no content beyond the patheticly sad home page was rendered in FireFox (or Safari). Someone please load up a gun with some Zeldman and squeeze the trigger.

Cannot…. form… sentences… You gotta check out gada.be. Cool URl. Cooler ides. Create a multiple prong web search be foisting words into a URL. Aimed to mobile users for quick results. Wow. Huh? Try http://rip-mix-learn.gada.be/ Or, http://rss.gada.be/ Hey, http://wilma.gada.be/ What? Is there a http://dead-cat.gada.be/? Mergermania! http://blackboard-webct.gada.be/ (Nahhhh, that one is empty. What a surprise!) But there’s more! tack on an OPML to any result, and you get the sources as an OPML file. http://rip-mix-learn.gada.be/opml Wild!

flickr foto impulsive optimistavailable on my flickr One of the images tagged in flickr as physicalmetadata. Wow, much better than cryptic “labels on soup cans”! With this metadata, we know this is a good dog, an optimist! I think (rather I Google) this is connected to the Flickr Peep Show exhibit. Wow, to be in Amsterdam and tagging….

I got an email recently from someone trying to suggest we were inserting adds into a feed displayed with Feed2JS falsely suggested on pappamashkin blog. Nothing could be further from the truth. Heck we do not even insert a credit back link in the free service we provide. But curious, I dug deeper. The culprit is Feedster, which is the source of the feed. It looks like pappamashkin is trying to create a feed based on content from his/her site that includes the keyword “PHP”. The Feedster web view of the feed displays this below two links for “Sponsored Links”, yet when you look in the RSS version of this same feed, you find an extra top level inserted item for some ad “Live AMD Online Event 3 — Dual-Core Solutions (ADV)”, the curious item “pappamashkin” may have thought we were shoving in there. It’s not us, old pappamashkin, it [...]

This semester I am taking a complete respite from the usual big ed tech conferences… well, I am taking a break from all of them. The time spent traveling, the cost of travel, really do not balance for the things gained. That said, online conference have yet to really find a niche yet that provides value as well. The value I speak of is what I am able to gain by surfing RSS feeds and blogs I place my trust in. So last week there were 10s, 20s, maybe much more from our system among the 6 gazllion other ed tech types in Orlando for EDUCAUSE 2005, but really, for all the techies there is hardly made a ripple in the blog-o-sphere. Of course the bulk of blogging activity was taking place in the EDUCAUSE hosted blogs which were nice, lots of podcasts, but mostly lots of “rah-rah”. I am [...]

Oh, what I would do with $72,000,000 of blog bucks! From How Much Is My Blog Worth?: Inspired by Tristan Louis’s research into the value of each link to Weblogs Inc, I’ve created this little applet using Technorati’s API which computes and displays your blog’s worth using the same link to dollar ratio as the AOL-Weblogs Inc deal. My blog is worth $72,825.66.How much is your blog worth? Yet another cool thing swiped from D’Arcy Norman…