CogBlogged from ‘October, 2005’

Yesterday, a phone call cam and was like one of those cans of compressed air designed to blow the cobwebs off my neurons. Someone teaching psychology at a school located in the middle of the US was interested in a multimedia project dating back to 1997 (and that was when it was completed). Negative Reinforcement University (NRU) was a multimedia CD-ROM that was actually content designed by a team of students and a faculty member. NRU was sketched out to be a game-like exploration and experience of negative-reinforcement, with the navigation metaphors lifted directly out of Myst. It was one of my favorite of all time projects. Back in 1997, the web was not very viable for creating this, so it was done as a CD-ROM built in Macromedia Director. We did manage to convert it to a version that does play back via the web using the Shockwave plug-in. [...]

As the tawdry saying goes… “I Like to watch” It’s not what your dirty minds think… I was one of more than 100 people watching LiveMarks, a near real time window of the input to the social bookmarking pile called del.icio.us: LiveMarks is a project to show del.icio.us bookmarks live. On the left of LiveMarks you can see most recently popular bookmarks. On the right, del.icio.us bookmarks scroll by as people bookmark links on del.icio.us. It’s a bizarre yet fascinating way to watch a social network multiply before your eyes. Vogue Trend Report…. Tips for aplpying for a job on craigslist… Oahu Vacation Rental – House – Sleeps: 2… Alliance pour refonder la gouvernance en Afrique… Why I Hate the Apache Server… Home Depot Credit (and why so often this link? who would bookmark a login page?) …. Walk – Don’t Walk Chair | Uncrate… It literally is hypnotizing to [...]

= Anybody But Yankees Bottom of the eighth, and things are going well. My bias is rooted in my childhood heros circa 1970 and 1983

If you lived through an era of music on LPs to CDs to now MP3s, you may be experiencing a syndrome I have felt myself… you’re listening nicely to a song on your digital music player, and your past patterns of listening to the order of songs on a fixed medium cause you to expect the next song on an album to show up, and BAM! You get a different song by a different artist! I deem this syndrome Audiosequentialdisruptus. Like I might be listening to my collection of ancient rock songs– I get to the end of Baba O’Riley on Who’s Next, and my mind is fully expecting to launch into the next track. But instead of sliding into Bargain I get, unexpectedly, the Clash belting out Magnificent Seven! My audio sequencing has been disrupted! It is a bit dis-orienting! You even begin to sing the next song and [...]

Who wudda thunk an audience would fill a theater for a one-man play about using Google? My wife called yesterday and said through her work we could have front row seats for the opening of Dave Gorman’s Googlewhack Adventure. I’m sworn to secrecy about not giving away the plot, but I laughed so hard my sides are still healing. The show is one man’s adventure of chasing down the people behind “googlewhacks” the bizarre combination of two words put into Google that result in only one search result: It started when I received an e-mail from a stranger telling me that I was a googlewhack. I didn’t know what a googlewhack was. Now I do. A googlewhack is what happens when two words are entered in to Google and it comes back with one and only one hit. So when the stranger told me that I was a googlewhack, he [...]

It’s some very small things in web sites that clearly point out to me that they were (a) designed by programmers; or (b) never run through usability testing by humans. Here is today’s morsel… An email notification arrived telling of a new message posted to some discussion forum I cannot recall visiting for a project I barely remember. I really hate notifications that just say “Something new has been posted by Kerry Polangalog, click here to read”. It would take no overhead to provide the text of the posting or at least a 500 character snippet. How do I judge whether it is worth my time to click to a site, log in, and read what old Kerry has said? What if it is just a “I agree!” posting? How motivated will I be to have spent the effort to get that? But wait, that is just the pre-amble, not [...]

A few posts back I asked for some help to Convince Curmudgeons with Comments — this is in reference to a few vocal critics of our online report tool for a faculty summer project professional growth program who did not want copies of their projects to be cross listed in our Maricopa Learning eXchange. As is the reports themselves are about 4 clicks in from the main professional growth site to the Examples of Summer projects where likely few web explorers might venture; also the value that the MLX adds over just a response to a handful of questions is the ability to attach relevant web sites and upload supplementary media files which can be attached. For example, Donna Gaudet’s project on Online Community and Retention Research has a static report on the FPG web site (response to the report form questions) while her MLX package has the same responses [...]

Harriet’s blog is pink, peppy, and personal. Is it “real” (and what is “real”?)

According to CollaborativeRank, the new tool that analyzes social bookmark activity on del.icio.us, my own tagging activity is ranked “nonaggressive” (at least I am in 143nd place): What is CollaborativeRank? It’sl like GoogleRank for del.icio.us tagging: Del.icio.us users who bookmark helpful/timely URLs (as evidenced by others subsequently bookmarking those URLs) will be rewarded with higher CollaborativeRank, which means that their bookmarking will have greater influence on this search engine’s rankings. For more, see Wired News Tag, You’re It: Best Bookmarker and learn about Numero Uno.

flickr foto New Bottom Partsavailable on my flickr My 2002 vintage iBook finally got home from a month’s vacation to Apple’s repair resort in Tennesse. In addition to a logic board replacement, they replaced the bottom case (the white new battery replaced a few months ago is still shinier) and a new optical drive (if you peek close you can see it is still in cellophane) Just short of 4 weeks of dropping off my iBook at the Apple Store, it is back in my hands. It was just 7 days short of its AppleCare expiration when it went belly up, so at first I was feeling pretty damn lucky. And it got more than just the logic board replaced. Like Steve Austin, it has been rebuilt, though maybe not stronger, faster, etc (nor is it worth $6 million dollars). Also replaced was the bottom case (the little lock switch [...]