CogBlogged from ‘September, 2006’

flickr foto It’s not everydayavailable on flickr …that yours truly comes second in a beauty contest. This happened a few months back, but was reminded when iw as organizing some directories on my laptop. I’ve been spending some time recently in Second Life, drumming up events and activities for the NMC Campus — it is insanely curious, interesting, yet hard to quantify what the “there” is “there”, but you feel it there. My SL hobby is taking in world photos (they are NOT screenshots, damn it flickr!), and over the summer I stumbled upon a notice for an iphoto contest at a virtual gallery. The theme was “water” and I tossed in two photos [1] [2]. This is done by uploading the images (you save them as BMP files to your computer), which cost L$10 per upload, and then dropped them on the profile of the avatar who was running [...]

Hey, it is all about ME, right? So, if you thik this can measure the impact of your blog on the universe, give a spin of Bloginfluence, where you enter the URL of your blog (that was not 100% obvious on the form), and you need to dig out your Bloglines ID. Let the browser spin a bit, and the slot machines wheels spit out, and the grand resounding impact of CogDogBlog is…. My influence [14202] C’mon, you cannot resist, can you? Drop your important work, and feed the ego machine…. A tail wag of credit goes out to Alex Alavais… who has 2000 more influence points! I happily reside down on the far right of the long tail.

Despite my best intentions, I am now in a state of blogging to about 4 or 5 sites, all my own doing. So why not do some internal promoting? On the personal side, is I Hate Running, a WordPress I put together last year when I completed my first ever half marathon. I ran a second one just 3 months later, so “hate” become “sorta like”. This blog was a fun stretch with the template, and taught me some new tricks with using custom fields to trigger different content affects. There’s a fair amount of randomness hidden away there too. So in the spirit of efficiency, rather than running 13.1 miles on 2 separate dates, I am combining to run my first full marathon in January 2007. The blog serves as my diary, log, and a way to connect with others– like Kleph who has been commenting from Peru. Okay, [...]

I struggle to find the solid chunks of time to take care of some pending updates to Feed to JavaScript (Feed2JS). I am about half way through setting up a code site on eduforge, and need to create a web front end. This will be the primary source for the current code release (at least a few intrepid folk have found it), and soon the documentation, history, FAQ, etc. I hope to see the questions I get go to the forums there, along with feature requests. I hope some developers might be interested in signing up to help plug the holes and ad some new features. I am still learning about all the tools available on the site, but its a great resource place to hang code. What is still half baked in my lab is: * a way for the users of the primary and soon to expand mirror [...]

Let’s say someone sends you some info related to a project, maybe some links, etc… is it bloggable? One could say, if it is on the web, discoverable, Gooogle-able, then it is open to be blogged about? I faced this recently with something I sent out that some info linked to a project site that is not quite ready for public exposure… and one person took that as a prompt to blog about it. Now, I take the responsibility, since there were never any parameters set out by me, I did not prepend a message or the project with a request to keep it out of public sites until it was prime time. My bad. But does that make it fair game? Likely so. A link is wide open to anyone who can find it, guess it, etc, right? It’s really not even a problem, and the impact is not [...]

This is a miniscule point, but the things I like about the features rolled out by sites like Google, flickr, etc, is that sometimes they just slip something in like a surprise… the biddy post I made about the Google Home page adding tabbed navigation caught my eye, only because I whizzed by the page a few times, and saw something that was not there maybe a week or so ago: It was tiny, and begged me to click, and explore. There was not a big ad campaign on TV (“Google Has Added minty fresh TABS”), not a big product launch hawked by PR folks (Announcing Google Home Page 2003 v 2.34! Now More Navigable!!!!), no articles in geek magazines…. they just slipped it in. What does that say? I cannot say exactly why I like it, but it feeds me need to explore, to notice what is different. I [...]

I’ve had the personalized Google home page set on all my browsers for a while, but just recently noticed that you can now add tabs to organize and spread out the different tools and feeds you can use. So I gleaned a few off the front view, leaving my flickr wallet,Gmail inbox, delicious tagged sites, a few tools: And moving a set of “tasty” RSS feeds to a second tab, a aggregator in any other sense, plus a third one for a few among thousands of available tool modules (they seem endless): All of them seem to load faster. It really feels like home. Why the heck would I want my web browser open with someone else’s content? Yuck.

This has been quite a few days… I’ve been in Newark, NJ, for a meeting related to NMC’s project on MacArthur Foundation Series Digital Media (no link, a rather long, un-bloggable story there), but it has been a momentous gathering of top names in the many fields. There are 90 some expert authors and editors working on 6 new volumes to be published in Spring 2007, along with a series of online resources coming online sometime later his fall. Among all the activity, I got to gently pull many of them aside for some audio and video interviews… the gem of all this was getting me does of blog fandom fed by getting to sit about 10 minutes with Henry Jenkins, whose blog “Confessions of an Aca/Fan” is an incredible stream of content flowing in great amounts. I won;t get to edit until next week, but when I asked about [...]

I amidst a mostly blogless stretch, chalked up to a hellacious travel schedule recently without even much time to think and breath, much less write. Just got back home Friday night, technically Saturday at 2:00 AM on the last leg of a cross country circle. The last end was four days in Austin for another iteration of the NMC Marcus Project workshops — these are intense 3 day sessions for participants from Texas art museums where they learn some basics of audio video shooting and editing, woven with the processes of digital storytelling, for the result of creating rich interactive pieces about their collections using the Pachyderm software. We seem some amazing results for such a short time with new software, and we are able to start sharing some of the early birds in the project gallery. Much more to come there. Things continue to buzz behind the scenes for [...]

I’m doing a keynote session for the Basic/Advanced Training track for the K12 Online Conference in October — themed “Unleashing the Potential” (Darren had great words of flattery, plus its a great gang to team up with). The ideas are still brewing, but I was keen to rather than talk generally about the nuts and bolts of broad technologies like blogs, wikis, RSS, to come up with a great set of discrete, neat things one could do with existing web tools, either doing something cool within a common tools (e.g. annotated images with flickr notes) or doing something creative with lesser known tools like gliffy. So obviously, I do not have a big overflowing bag of items, so I am tossing this out to the wider net to ask others to contribute– an open wiki is posted at http://cogdoghouse.wikispaces.com/webtricks. What is concocted will be set up in a fascinating, loosely [...]