CogBlogged from ‘November, 2006’

I’m curious about other flickr users behaviors… When you get an email notice that someone has seleted you as a contact, do you: * immediately accept (“I want to be friends with everybody”) * check out their photos first (“Oh my gawd, they collect photos of ________!”) * wait a while (“I am trying to get some work done!”) * delete and ignore (“Eww, yuck, people!”) I almost thought about titling this, “Are You a Contact Whore?” but that’s a bit tawdry, eh? The reflex is usually one of “Ahh, that makes my ego feel niiiiice, ooooh, more please”, and to take action right away. If I cannot tell who it is (which is hard form flickr user names), I do check them out, but nearly always I reciprocate. Yup, I might be a Contact ______. But this FOAF (Friend of a Friend) concept is an underlying thread to tools [...]

Hah! Just plain geeky fun crazy. What would happen if I tagged this in del.icio.us? asked Kotke in del.icio.us will eat itself. I won’t give it away, but you have to have some sense of del.geek.i.ness to appreciate it. And it smells like a case of an attempt at recursion without the terminal condition to make it work. Come to think of, in a chat today with Brian, we were both marveling at how often we reach to Wikipedia for a quick reference check. Look at how rich the info is on the entry for recursion! It is explained via Sponge Bob, a Serpinski triangle, some funkier math logic, and the sublime dictionary definition of recursion. It is a rich entry, indeed. Would Sponge Bob ever make it in a printed tome? Even perhaps more noteworthy, is a relative lack of public crying about the “validity” of Wikipedia. is it [...]

I’m not sure where or why I would ever do this, so put this in the category of “curious, but some day I will slap my hand on my forehead and say, ‘I have a need for this’!” RSS2GIF can render, dynamically (I guess) the headlines of an RSS feed as an image, so you could have it on a web site as a way to generate a graphic based on an RSS feed. Here is my cheesy example (of course, using my own feed!) It gives only the recent post titles, and there are no links to each post, just the main blog. So where, how, why would you use this? I am scratching my head and wondering. A linktribution to ResearchBuzz for mention of this site

There seems to be no end to the toys, tools, and cool add-ons that flickr spawns, simply by allowing its programming interface to be available to outside developers. The latest, is Splashr, billed humbly as “a tool for presenting Flickr photos.” Flickr, already allows you to create slide shows from your recnt photos, photos from a specific tag, etc, but the slideshow presentation is, well, rather basic. That’s where splashr comes in- you can give it a tag, and/or a flickr account, and then you can choose from a number of HTML or Flash “templates” to form a more elegant, or just different, interface for presenting slideshows. So, for example, there is the simple slideshow flickr does for my photos tagged with nmv2006reg, ones from the NMC Regional Conference, but through Spashr, I can create, for example, a slideshow using the reflector filmstrip (kind of like one of the Keynote [...]

Of the things I hang on my personal Google home page (well you cannot see it beyond a snapshot, but, it is how you can create a mashup of content from many sources, feeds, photos, gmail, search tools. totally customizable), my favorite is the flickr photo wallet module. Very simply, everytime you go “home” you see a random photo from yours (or any other) flickr account. I’ve tried a few, but most of them do not reach back to all of your photos. So my memory game is to glance at the page when it loads and try to remember where or what the picture is from (I recently crossed the 2000 photo count, no big compared to others, but goes back to 2004). This one stumped me- I could not tell what it was, where it was from. Was it insects? Sushi? Some bad conference buffet? Dog doo? Nope- [...]

And here I thought Spell With flickr was the best thing since milk bones– that ‘s nothing compared to geoGreeting, which converts a string of text into one built form letters formed from the shapes of streets, buildings, landforms found from images in Google Map satellite views. You just type the message, and geoGreeting generates a unique URl you can send as a greeting Try my litte message of instructions for what you should do these evening: http://www.geogreeting.com/view.html?z6TtTou+p-v29x-+lG2 And when you watch it, the letters pop out one at a time, spelling the message before your eyes, and showing where in the world they came from. A linktribution for this great find goes to Dean Shareski

It was close to a year ago I moved this blog, it’s predecessor, and some of my old vintage 1990s home page from servers I maintained when I was at Maricopa. Before I left, the old “Jade” server was running, and I set up some htaccess redirects to send requests to their proper new places. nice and clean. Well, the problem is that the IT folkd back at Maricopa, apparently yanked the machine (no one was there to likely even bug them), and my own blog here had lots of links and image references that pointed to a 404 server. Fixing this was not all that complex, but took a few steps. The first was covering my _____ by going into phpMyAdmin, in my WordPress database, and making a backup copy of the wp_posts table as wp_posts_backup (via the operations tab). I still downloaded a SQL version of the contents, [...]

Updated WordPress. Time on task, about 4 minutes. Easy-Peasy. Now I need to tend to a few other WP sites I have laying around elsewhere,

I am sure there are things like this out there, but when I was doing my simple stats for flickr tagging, I took the very inefficient method of paging through the flickr tag pages and listing unique user names. Surely there is some flickr tool that can tell how many unique users have used a specific tag? I picked and poked but could not find it. There are plenty of things to return data per individual account, and lots of cool way to render public tags. Same thing for del.icio.us- surely there is a web tool to show how many people have used the same tag??

As a follow-up to my post on small numbers of people doing tagging, as of today, for our NMC Regional Conference held last week in San Antonio, we have tagged in flickr 393 photos from 11 individuals, more than we had at our summer conference in Cleveland where the attendence was 3 times as large as San Antonio. See all tagged photos. And we were able to use the slide show as the screen display prior to our closing keynote session, which was well enjoyed by the folks coming into the auditorium. I am not ready to draw any statistical conclusions, but will toss some anecdotal ones. Okay, maybe nmc2006reg was not the greatest tag, and some folks got it switched around, but the only promotion for this was the mention in our program. Secondly, via this, I picked up 3 new flickr contacts, folks I did not know before. [...]