CogBlogged from ‘May, 2006’

flickr foto Holding Handsavailable on flickr A fascinating sculpture outside a Department of Education building in Calgary My other web experiment today for the NMC Conference is setting up a page to provide some persuasion and aggregation for my goal of having participants “Tag This Conference”. The site I set up: http://www.nmc.org/events/2006summerconf/tag.php is aggregating the public tags of nmc2006 from Flickr, Technorati, and del.icio,us… and is using 3 different services for doing so. For flick, I use the JavaScript Flickr badge to display all photos tagged with nmc2006 (of which there are a grand total of 2, both mine planted as seeds. For technorati, to catch

Almost by definition, RSS, in its full XML glory, is ugly, and I have said before, “unsuitable for human eyes”. it is machine language, and there is no reason a person should look at it very long (geeks aside): But I’ve known in the back of my mind, it does not need to be so, as shown by the feeds displayed at Feedburner, e.g. http://feeds.feedburner.com/cogdogbloglab– that is the URL you can use anywhere RSS is accepted, but viewed in the browser, well it looks like a nice pretty web page. Peek at the source, and you are back in code-ville. Howzit done? Through the magic of XSLT, a means to transform XML with stylesheets into something easier on the eyes, By no means do I really understand it, and the more I looked, the more complex it grew– it is almost a logical language in itself, that is.can be used [...]

flickr foto Cleveland Rocksavailable on flickr Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Next week, June 7-10, is the NMC Summer Conference, this year we are in Cleveland, hosted by a Fab Four of Case Western Reserve University, the Cleveland Institute of Art, the Cleveland Museum of of Art, and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. This is my first time being at the conference as part of the organzing team, rather than past years as a partiicipant, so maybe when I say the program is tremendous, my bias is showing. But since I first attended my first NMC (Ohio State in 2002), it became my “must-attend” conference. One of my interjected ideas is to put in the printed program a call for an official conference tag: Use web 2.0 tools to link conference content online! When you post photos, movies, blog posts, and relevant web sites using a web [...]

It was way overdue, but now our Feed2JS service and downloadable code now offers support for RSS feeds that contain links to podcast media– this means any RSS feed with RSS “enclosures” can now be rendered in any web page using our cut and paste code. Through a simple patch to the MagpieRSS parser library, and some new code under the hood, any media link found in an RSS enclosure, will be displayed with a “Play MP3″ button or “Play m4a” button for an enhanced podcast item. A bit of effort may be needed to do the right thing with style sheets, but that’s all on you. It’s all rather new, and I hope it does not cause havoc. Now available at http://feed2js.org/

Just because Gardner asked for it (and in fact it was recorded), here is a low quality, 80 minute MP3 from the session Brian Lamb and I did in Flagstaff on Social Software (or as we called it, Tag Cloud frenzy): http://cogdogblog.com/wp-content/audio/nau06-keynote.mp3 [1:20:00 36.6 Mb MP3]

I’m working on integrating a Google Calendar into a WP blog (not this one, an NMC project in development). The master plan is to allow a number of groups ti enter potential shared events into a common calendar, and syndicate to our blog site. I have a few events dumped into a Google Calendar for testing. What I’ve tried include: * wooglecal plugin – it’s easy to set up and use, but there is no control over the formatting/display of content- and it automatically skips past events. It would need some moderate tinkering to set up options for which calendar items are displayed (e.g. a reduced list for a side bar). Temporary demo is here. * gCal plugin – has a nicer WP interface, but I could not get it do see more than one past events * AJAX Google Calendar Events – works well for a sidebar display (tweaking [...]

Sigh, here is another yet another lame comment spam effort I spotted starting today, scanning the scum that is caught in the Spam Karma 2 nets on this blog. Comment spammers are using Feedburner to insert into the URl field things like http://feeds.feedburner.com/BuyHotPokerPillsPorn — all in the hope of hoisting some pages somewhere on the web that have links back to their insipid products. I can only imagine, they use something like blogger to push their links into Feedburner, and then attempt to build indirect link backs via comment spam URL entries. So I am hoping the folks at feedburner are prepared or doing something to prevent these accounts from being used. On the other hand, thankfully, comment spammers have very low creativity, and their stupid attempts are blatantly obvious. For example, if I write a rabid post about Social Software, isn’t bone head obvious when I get a comment [...]

Gulp. After telling everyone today about the virtues of using flickr creative commons images, I got caught. I my haste last night to find a banner image for our keynote tag cloud page, I located a nice San Francisco Peaks profile via a creative commons search in Flickrlilli. I did not even register that the license was “No-Derivative” yet I cropped, stretched, and faded it to fit my design. And Dawn noticed that this was her shared flickr image used also in her own blog site http://flagstaffdailyphoto.blogspot.com/! She nailed me! And I deserved it. Fortunately, she is being gracious to give me permission to use the image (thanks Dawn, and you have awesome photos!) but I owe it to come clean. Okay folks, get excited about the Creative Commons license, but read the conditions (and follow them). I will be much more rigorous going forward, even in the wee hours [...]

The sky over Flagstaff Arizona today was actually crystal clear, but if you had appropriate x-ray glasses on you may have spotted some tag clouds, sprinkled with some Canadian flair. Is that too vague an opening blog post? Okay, today I had the sheer pleasure and honor to co-present, and that verb is used loosely, because it was really more of a free form “jam” with my colleague Brian Lamb at the Northern Arizona University E-Learning Institute. We were asked to brig on the “social software firehose”. Brian and I invariably have much fun in this process, mostly because we generally cook up something novel and new (and partially risky). Brian landed in Phoenix yesterday, and after a critical planing meeting at my favorite New Mexican style lunch spot in Scottsdale, we chugged up the I-17 hill (well I did show the back road around New River) to Flagstaff, idly [...]

flickr foto Brother and Sisteravailable on flickr Today is Cadu’s birthday! She (black lab on the left) and Mickey (right) were from the same litter, though differed in just about every other form factor. Cadu will be 5 today; Mickey is forever frozen at 2 and a half. Doggie party tonight!