CogBlogged from ‘June, 2006’

Perhaps we should be speaking about things moving “at the speed of the web”…. go away from a web based tool/service for a week or more, and you may have missed 3 new versions or 40 new features. No I am not complaining (I like the chaos), just observing from a floating raft in the river web. A few barks back, I was trying to find a way to incorporate data form a Google calender into a wordpress powered site. Editing the calendar was slick in the Google Calendar interface, but sipping out content… well I tried some WordPress Plugins (mixed results, difficult to control output, or to get events in the right order); tried some AJAX code but later found this was yielding RSS telling me the calendar changes, not the date order– and lastly, using an iCal plugin. This effort is for NMC’s Second Life Campus site — [...]

I’ve never done it formally, but have been in the periphery of some of the best folks who teach digital storytelling. My former colleagues at Maricopa, Linds Hicks, Rachel Woodburn, and Cheryl Colan have been generating magic for years (and right now they are weaving the same magic in New Zealand- Cheryl is even managing to vidblog some of the action). Each summer, they have run a “Digital Storytelling LearnShop” for Maricopa faculty, that produced some of the most moving pieces I have seen anywhere. Okay, I am gushing with bias, but having been there in the past, I can say that it’s been the one workshop where everybody produces something of high and meaningful quality. Since I was at NMC this year, I missed being there in mid-May, though I did pop in on the last day to see the final movies. What a show! And as part of [...]

It was well over a year ago I wrote a little piece about Reader2, the site that allows you to use a search form to pull up bibliographic data on books, tag ‘em , tag suggestions, folksonomy, syndication, etc, all that funky 2.0 kind of tasty activity. My little experiment was to load up the thrift store books I had read (or not) that I had found at my favorite haunts- thift stores, yard sales, etc. I’d not kept up on my documentation at http://reader2.com/cogdog, but tossed a few in tonight– maybe a grand investment of $2.00 for these items. Found at the Pine Thirft Store (tag!). I lived through this history, and just ate up reading how Mosaic was first hatched. I got my first taste in October 1993, and now know when I was submitting my old sites to the NCSA What’s New Page, that Andreeson himself was [...]

Last week I had the pleasure of getting a lesson in Audio Recording and Microphones 101 from Gardner Campbell. Thanks Dr Glu for spending some time to clue me in, this was purely selfish on my knowledge seeking side, but I am sharing the audio recording for anyone who cares. http://cogdogblog.com/wp-content/audio/dr-microphone.mp3 [35:19 min, 24.3 mp3] What follows are just some of the many references Gardner mentioned. It only dawned on me after having set up a time to chat, that I was going to be editing this and posting it as a podcast, and then thinking- “Gardner will learn how sloppy I am on my audio editing…” — the truth is there are audio experts out there that will hear every pop, crack, clip, and there are others for whom those might was well by the whistling of bats (which most humans do no hear). We had decided to talk [...]

On a few project front I am wrestling with trying to pick the “best” web video format. Some have boiled it down to selecting the “elusive” best format. In my previous work at Maricopa, e.g. for our digital storytelling collection, I had settled on providing video as streaming Quicktime, .mov, (we had an X-serve server running QuickTime Streaming) and streaming Windows Media, /wmv, (one of our colleges provided us some streaming space on their Helix server). Late in the game, we added as an addition, iPod video versions (.m4v) as a podcast. Long, long ago I was also encoding video as Real Video, but that n was dropped with nary a complaint. SO now on my new Second Life project for NMC and looking at our other NMC video content, i am trying to sort out the best strategy, finding it as clear as Mississippi mud. Most people have a [...]

Prompted by Will’s post “Digg For Edubloggers/ Do We Need to Get Our Act Together”, I added EdBloggerNews as a new option to my Multi-Post Bookmarklet tool at http://cogdogblog.com/code/marklet_maker.php– mainly because I was going to try and toss EduBloggerNews a few of the links I am sending to del.icio.us. While in the code, I tried a few approaches to make all of the pop-ups jump to the head of the pack, but failed to get something to work reliably. This means if you have a few tools in the mix, the windows may pop up behind the main window. I am open to any suggestions as to end around this; adding code to name each window and then issue it a xxx.focus() did not work as expected.

A few weeks, months (dog time) ago I speculated about the possible substance abuse activities of my Technorati feed. No denial or admission was forthcoming, yet I am still cocking my head sideways at what the Technorati feed for this blog actually catches in its nets. Do not get me wrong, a good 20-25% of the time, I find a new blogger that has chosen to link to mine, and I scratch my curiosity itch (it is all about vanity, correct?) to check ‘em out. However, a significant portion includes people who have nicely include my URL on their sidebar, a.k.a blogroll. This is fine, but it seems every time they post a new entry, I get another ping via Technorati. Then there are times Technorati seems to get nostaligic, and pull up items it has already pinged me. Maybe it is just an artifact of someone republishing their pages?? [...]

I cannot say anymore that flickr is not being responsive, after the knock knock post, I got a rather long, and detailed message, with some clarification of NIPSA, why it is there, and some re-assurrances that they are working on ways to flag things with categories for ones that are not photos. NIPSA is all about what turns up in flickr-wide searches: In the meantime, your photos will not show up in global search results. This is not because we hate Second Life, or hate screenshots, or hate you, or have any specific official opinion at all about philosophical questions like “What is a photograph?” or “Where is the dividing line between real and virtual worlds in our brave new digital age?” (personally, I’m sympathetic to the argument that ‘photos’ taken with ‘cameras’ in SL are actually photos). It’s because Flickr is *for* photos. Even when we have support finer-grained [...]

While there are at least 20 or more different social bookmark tools out there, I am pretty much committed and hooked on del.icio.us. It has that no frills but highly functional interface, but mainly because it has so many subtle features that are easy to overlook, even if you have been a regular user. It is subtly powerful, in a way that many people do not see. So I cam going to cover three “next level” things you can do in del.icio.us, two of which I had not even checked out before last week. I am sure there are more treasures in there, and remember that just about everything… no make that everything displayed in del.icio.us has an associated RSS feed.

Web video is exploding, and more than just hosting and tagging clips with exploding soda bottles… Check out this re-mixed clip from the Weblog Project called What is a Blog? The 50 Second Answer: This is a great remix that really shows how much more impact and insight a short well edited clip can do in helping others get, in less than a minute, a good idea of what a blog really is. Jumpcut.Remixed by Alessandro Luccardi on Jumpcut. Sorry, I pretty much lifted the flash source code from the original site. But it is to make a point…. Now this is what gets exciting. Click the “remix” button in the video above. You get all of the vido segments in a timeline, ripe for adding, re-re-mixing, etc. I’ve casually seen a few of these online media mashup tools, and they keep getting more interesting. Jumpcut…. it must be the [...]