CogBlogged from ‘February, 2006’

I am quickly working up ideas for my Monday demo session on the “p-casting” word. Thinking about some of Cole’s comments desiring simplicity, I slapped my head in shock as I realize that Odea was a tool site I had known about, bookmarked, but had not really explored. Someone else can better summarize what it does, but it is free, and certainly a Small Piece of the Loosely Joining variety. You can subscribe to podcasts, tag ‘em, but more– you can record directly into a Flash tool a short audio (3 minutes), and you can even phone in a recording. I am sure there is more, and I am still at the playing level, but it seems to offer a simple interface for doing record and publish audio. You can set up different “Channels” and these can have their own RSS feed and podcast subscribe links. I did a quick [...]

The notion of “distributed conversations” in blog space seems to rear its head on some cycle. It always seems to boil down to a polarization of those who find some level of comfort in the chaotic widely distributed notion and those that seem to covet the notion that it needs to be nicely organized in one location. Hey folks, it can be both. But first some serendipity. Finding interesting/curious/odd treasures on the web just by happy accident or curiosu link clicking is a little pleasure no search engine will match. I was reading a post at Burning Bird which was of weak interest, when the URL of a commenter grabbed my attention- “ralph” leads to http://www.thereisnocat.com/. Given my overly canine motif here, and previous gentle stabs of blogs as “cat diaries”, I could not resist a click. Okay, There Is No Cat has a feline flavor, but its not about [...]

I’ve been trying to use coComment, the tool that allows you to keep a record of your “distributed” blog conversations– by activating a bookmark when commenting elsewhere, coComment stores it on their site,a dn then submits it normally to the blog you are jabbering about. This way you can track conversations by visiting your coComment page (or by using its own RSS feed). Here is a peek at my little bit of coCommeting: This saves the trouble of having to remember to return to a blog entry to see if anyone responded to your stellar remarks, and avoids having to get email reminders (and not all blogs even offer than as an option). The nice thing is in the view there or via RSS you can track the other responses, not just your own. Actually I am getting more use out of my coComment RSS feed in my aggregator, I [...]

Among the steady stream of spam for acne treatments, continued gambling and substance fetishes, apartment rentals, disaster recovery software is a new variety that I am left dumfounded in trying to interpret– these are one line messages of unintelligible alpha numerics. e.g. JKzw7GIFFsiglB wfedcfy80EZR FXku7fmkbyn0t or SABok8o1e5aYn A9CuXC4vvFU8c YbMFRUk A23NLhe

Actions speak much more clearly than definitions. It was D’Arcy at the UBC Social Software Salon who described it something like being removing or downplaying the “software” portion of online social interaction. Whatever your way of describing what “social software” is how, submitted below is a nice example of the informal way the web, blogs, maybe even RSS play a role in collectively building something in a way not previously possible. At the 2006 Northern Voice Conference, I got an early seat for Nancy White’s session on Seven Competencies of Online Interaction (I very much liked the discussion approach she had organized for the Mossecamp session the day before). Brian Lamb convened the session with a quick intro, and someone asked if it was being recorded, and there was no answer. Since I had in my bag my handy little iRiver MP3 recorded, I quickly fished it out, and started [...]

I’m scheduled to do next week two demos at our colleges on the latest buzzword sweeping the educational technology landscape… podcasting. Following a cue from Brian Lamb in asking the internet for help, I’ll put out my own call (imitation == flattery). This is just an overview (I think) of what podcasting offers for educators, how they might use it, and maybe some basics for getting started (actually I was given no parameters). I have a starting list of the kinds of things to demo I crammed into 15 minutes a few weeks aga but hey, that was 3 weeks ago, and most of the Internet has changed since then. But what I would love to hear is what you would show/do so as to interest a group of people who are not familiar with podcasting and maybe ranging from technology leery to geeky? How to get them past the [...]

I’m trying to spend some time offline, resting for 5 days in the quiet little town of Strawberry, AZ. The last 4 weeks has been about the most travel packed ever, and between not being here, and trying to keep up with the stuff here, I’m a bit netted out. There’s piles of web sites back at Maricopa to patch. Out IT people, on their own,without notice, implemented some sort of Apache security patch that is torpedo-ing just about every perl script I have (have not done perl since 2000, but we have a lot of not so golden oldies, plus this affect the smattering of MovableType sites.) The refuse to explain what it does, what if affords, except I have to try to explain why our web sites respond with “403 Forbidden”. I did manage to spend a whole day w/o opening the laptop. I may go a few [...]

Like Scott, i believe I was tagged too by Sir D’Arcy. (Hah Scott, I’m not letting you kill the game of tag!) Four jobs I’ve had – Laying the lines for little league baseball (very crooked ones at that) – Soil Compaction Tester – Running a golf driving range (yes, driving the cart that all you yahoos aimed at) – Campus mail delivery Four movies I can (and do) watch over and over – Forrest Gump – The Bridge over the River Kwai (“Madness! Madness!”) – Memento (there is something new each time) – Ben Hur Four places I’ve lived – Baltimore, MD (started) – Newark, DE – Los Alamos, NM (9 of the weirdest months of my life) – Flagstaff, AZ (almost heaven) Four TV shows I(‘ve) love(d) – Lost (I am hooked, and cannot let go) – Six Feet Under (ditto, thanks to DVDs, no HBO here) – [...]

flickr foto Better than RSS! Better Then AJAX!available on my flickr Harry was working on some new internet buzzwords this morning. Later today, I hope to be learning more about GHOS, Mady, and JiLT. Looks like some HTMl tags floating around the table too. I’ve been just as guilty of doing Social Software / Web 2.0 type demos that are the equivalent of urban strength fire hoses. “Let’s get ‘em bloggin’ and wiki’in and bookmarkin’ and flickrin’ and …” It seems almost like a techno fools natural tendancy to try and get everyone excited abotu everything. But the alphabet soup is likely a big bowl to slurp. In my numerous worthy discussions this week with Brian Lamb, I am rethinking pressuring up that hose in the future. I am thinking that a more in depth experience with one sort of tool would be more effective. I have seen this in [...]

I know I am repeating thoughts written elsewhere recently, but another great a ha from the week here in Vancouver has been participating in conference sessions that were conducted primarily in conversational mode, in engagement with an audience, as opposed to the traditional mode of presentation as lecture, inflicted onto an audience. This is just just trying to pat the backs of myself and colleagues Brian, Scott, D’Arcy, Jason for the sessions we did at UBC and at NorthernVoice– there was a great round of discussion in Nancy White’s session on Community Building, and the approach Kris Krug did at Moosecamp for the sessions on Digital Photography. These were all ones where the audience played as much as part as the conveners. Where we were invited to be part of the show, not dulled with ti being hit over our heads. Don’t take me as saying all presentations need to [...]