CogBlogged from ‘February, 2007’

Between travel earlier this week for NMC meetings, time off between now and Monday, and squeezing in many late night hours banging our new drupal site (should be able to share it in a few weeks), I’m feeling way behind the blog train. Just sifting through my RSS feeds, I am compelled to send a few shoutout linktributions to colleagues who really deserve a full CDB blog post. Well my first one is to WordPress 2.1, who’s autosave feature had snagged this post’s opening from certain defeat as I accidently closed the tab containing this draft! First, Bet’s screencast Shoulder-to-Shoulder Instructional Media: My Tagging Screencast at NTEN! is to me, the essence, and a must show item that most lucidly explains, and demonstrates, the use of tagging among people with a common interest to develop shared resources. It’s well produced, a bit fun, and uses labels and metaphors in a [...]

In between travel for meetings, trying to ramp up the new beta for an NMC site, and some time off this week, the blogging quotient here promises to be low and/or dull. Heck, I;ve not even taken a photo in like a week. And I’m not even getting to go to Northern Voice (sniff). I’m singing the blues.

Thanks to a tip from Tim Lauer, I am actually blogging this entry via IM from iChat using imified … slick!

Bryan Alexander writes of Web 2.0 network ecology stories and wonders about the phenomena of discovery, re-use of digital media. He shares examples of photos he has taken, shared have seen positive, maybe unintended use by others, as well as the joy of connecting with people beyond his current circle of connections (which is not small by any means). The two examples he shares are alone well worth reading his post, and I have no doubts that many readers here have had a similar story themselves. My own version is how my own (pre-web, scanned, on 3 links down from an old home page) photo: was discovered by a rock band in Germany, who asked if they could use it on their CD. A few months later, I had the disc in my hands: Not exactly that this matters in any important social context, but the mere fact that sharing [...]

Oddcast provides animated avatars on web pages that can speak and animate from text content. I was recently send a link to a demo where you can pay with it, and hastily recorded the screencast below (she seemed slow to respond on my first try, so you see the results when I pressed “Talk” repeatedly). Also weird is Paul’s voice in Audrey’s avatar. [flv:http://cogdogblog.com/wp-content/movies/oddcast.flv 480 368] The synch is off with compression I did on the screen capture and conversion, but it is much tighter if you play with the demo.

It might have been on c|net’s site for 8 years, but I just randomly discovered their “Big Picture” feature — by attaching associated links form their stories, this flash app can create a visual map, showing connected stories or companies featured on their site: For every story published, News.com editors and reporters included relevant links to other News.com stories. In addition, News.com highlights the important companies that appear in a story as well as attach appropriate topics to each story. My stumbling started with their story on Universities register for virtual future, where the sidebar link brought me to the “Big Picture” for this story: Clicking on a node can draw a new map, with that story as the center, and new links, or you can pop and view the full news story. This leads to some ways to explore content other than link hopping form the articles… Now this [...]

Talk about serendipity! I can count on one or two paws the number of times I've clicked on a Google AdSense ad. But in reading my inbox in Gmail, someone wriote about blog writing, and there was a link to Free Web Word Processor for your Blog.  I bit and look what I got!   it's a web blog editor (not just a weblog editor, it's a web weblog editor) with a "this is what MS word would look like if they really had a premonition of the web or took a ride on the clue train" — yes, like other web document editors, you get the rich text tools offered by TinyMCE under the hood.  I just grabbed a screenshot uploaded to flickr, and can post from my flickr right into the editing screen. Same for YouTube videos.    I'm not in grand need of a better editor (i still [...]

And maybe instead, we can get it with 5 minutes, no bullet points, no lecturing in Web 2.0 … The Machine is Us/ing Us, a YouTube gem: This comes from Digital Ethnography @ Kansas State University, “a working group of Kansas State University students and faculty dedicated to exploring and extending the possibilities of digital ethnography.” A linktribution to jill/txt though this video is bouncing all around the blogosphere and technorati-space.

It was time to make the run to upping this WordPress site to the current version, 2.1, nicknamed “Ella”. Hey, it is jazzy! There are promises of better code under the hood and some new features I’ve yet to really look much into. I’m pretty religious about following the upgrade instructions, backing up the static files, making a database dump, shutting off the plugins, downloading newer versions of the plugins, etc. But I also took the opportunity to do what I should have done when I move my site to Dreamhost, which is to use their “one-click” installs as it makes future updates, also one-click. But I was able to jump my previous install on board without too much sweat or cussing. First, I moved the entire directory, which includes not only wordpress but a few other piles of content, to a temp directory on my server– this gets pretty [...]

Thanks to a for:cogdog tag in del.icio.us from D’Arcy, I am currently auto messaging my Twitter account just by publishing this post. Nice! Now I might keep twittering a bit longer. This is done by courtesy of Vicissitude’s Twitter Updater WordPress plugin where you can specify your account, what activities it triggers updates for, and embed the title of the post in the twittering. Nice! Smart! Simple! My bashing continues… I doubt there will be something that updated my LinkedIN profile when I blog because (1) LinkedIn has no place to put some trivial frivolity beyond a choice of a whopping 4 urls you can add to a profile; and (b) there is no open API to LinkedIn. Score Twitter: 42, LinkedIn 3 Maybe reduce the score, the darn plug in did not work Third try- the Twitter settings have 2 different save buttons, so i did not save my [...]