CogBlogged from ‘November, 2005’

Wow, and here I’ve been thinking spammers are really dumb! They seem to know that I have a secret desire to be Canadian: I just do not know about the “care-giving” part, am I up for that? ;-)

Taking the cue from Stephen Downes who took it from Jay Cross, I quickly checked out SuperGlu a new Web.0 tool that aggregates anything that you may have stored elswhere that provides an RSS feed… SuprGlu is about bringing the pieces of your web content together into one central place for you, your friends, and maybe even your friends to-be. Do you already use services like del.icio.us, flickr, blogger, typepad, etc? SuprGlu is a new way to gather all your content from those sites. In a nutshell, SuprGlu: * gathers your content from popular webservices and publishes them in one convenient place. * presents your content with simple, great looking templates which you can customize. * is FREE to use! So in less than 10 minutes, I had glued together 4 or five pieces of my extended, syndicated self. The beauty of the glue is that it uses info that [...]

This month marks the 12th year since I hoisted my first HTML file on a web server and flicked on the switch. Since then, my master directory of web content files has something like 50 or 60 thousand documents, a sprawling metropolis of stuff. In talking recently about our web sites, I realized in the last year, my development or addition of new project or event web sites is driven my a goal of creating fewer, not more web pages. This is largely achieved via some solid lessons and methods re-used in PHP, where an entire web site can have 1 template, an external library of functions and code bits, and sub directories of content files. I do some with database, but quite a bit is done with just arrays of data, or content plucked from text files. This is one of the things weblogs quietly achieve for us, managing [...]

Without mentioning the Web X.0 cliché, Reader2 is a site definitely in the mix with elements of folksonomy, social networking, RSSing for people to build collections of books they have read or want to read. It’s pretty quick and easy to add book titles- the add form allows to enter a title and use an Amazon search- it Ajaxes the results right in the page, copelting the author, ISBN etc. You can add your own series of tags, a descipription of the book, or a review. It has dropdown categories of books that is awfully limited (please make it more extensive or something we can configure, why cannot this be tagged as well?); as well are the “status” you can assign to a book- again, make it more open or extensive. I’ve been playing with it off and on for a week…

I’m scurrying madly trying to ramp up a promise to have a Word Press publishing platform ready to release an online version of our mcli Forum. We have been doing a print and web version of this since 2001, and a previous ancestor since 1993. The print version twice a year costs more than a few $k, and takes up a huge amount of staff time in the editing and layout process. Then the web version is another conversion on top of that. And we have no good data on what people do with them after they go out through our campus mail system and land in peoples old fashioned in boxes (the wooden cubby ones in department offices). What we are proposing as gains for a completely online version are: * save money and time * shorten the editing process time and allow remote online editing * have no [...]

Albert IP, from Random Walk in E-Learning reports today At the most recent LOM (Learning Object Metadata) WG meeting in Orlando, it was decided that the work on the LOM RDF binding will be discontinued. The reason quoted is the formation of a new taskforce between IEEE LOM and Dublin Core Metadata Initiative. And in a related story submitted as a crumpled blurry fax obscured with unidentified beverage stains bearing the name of L. Lighips: Lorem ipsum ad semper noluisse efficiendi mel, nisl iudico graece vis te. Quo debet euripidis constituto ne, at sea volumus scripserit. Mei te inani splendide. Invidunt consequuntur nec ei, vel mollis audire impedit ad, pro nominavi voluptua ut. Vix cu munere denique hendrerit, sed at aperiri probatus accusata, laoreet mediocritatem pri cu. Ubique tempor habemus ut his, tritani placerat similique ex mel. Noluisse appetere ius ei, eum falli discere cu. An nec accusam delicatissimi, et [...]