CogBlogged from ‘April, 2007’

Modified my own flickr photo! I’ve been madly tagging sites on delicious for at least 2 or 3 years now, and rely on it solely as my web resource collection. For a long while I used as a tool a version of the bookmarklet tool I had rigged into my bookmarklet tool maker (wow there is one I’ve not updated in eons), but recently I have switched, and been liking more and more, the del.icio.us firefox extension. I sem to keep discovernng neat things it does to speed up and power by tagging habits. For one, it does the essentials I need- by using a mouse to highlight a chunk of text in a web page I plan to tag – it inserts that text automatically into the notes field. What is really cool about the new version, is that the pop up window now displays an indicator of my [...]

I am in danger of become a twitter centric fool. While others have identified it as having jumping the tuna, my own volume of twitter contact notices (must admit, I don’t add them all) has spiked significantly. Here in Arizona, I’d say Twitter has Jumped the Gila Monster. Another cool tool… TwitterCamp is a free app that allows you to create a giant (or not so giant) screen representing a fluid display of Twitter activity: TwitterCamp is a desktop application that allows you to monitor tweets from your friends using the popular Twitter service. The application was built for the ApolloCamp mini-conference and uses the recently released Apollo runtime alpha and Twitter API. The application is especially suited for running on large displays such as plasmas, LCDs, and projectors at conferences. It is simple to customize the interface so that you can use the application for your conference. I downloaded [...]

Expired Passively sitting in the glow of an overhead projector watching a presenter read words from a yellowed transparency. Tired Passively sitting in the glow of an LCD projector watching a presenter read words from a PowerPoint word slide. Wired Actively twittering in the glow of a laptop listening to a presenter read words in a You Tube video. I kid you not. Watch the slides being read to you. “Here’s the Web 2.0 Explosion! heh-heh-heh-heh-heh-heh-heh-heh”

In the “Blog Spammers Are Getting Trickier” departments, a comments snared today: Hi, What an Idea! Thank you for sharing this posted article for me or for every one, you made a great job for your Blog.Keep it up the good work.. Again thank you very much.. Cheers Regards, Cheska Smith <a href=”http://www.XXXXdeletedSpamSitexxx.com/”>Dog Training Device</a> it’s the approach of almost human saying generic praise. But the lack of specific context foils it, along with the tell tale URL to a marketing web site. And of course, the lovely, grammatically poised… “Keep it up the good work..”

Stephen had oatmeal for breakfast, so someone stepped up to keep the tweetverse informed:

Yesterday I co-presented as part of four amigos for MacLearning Environments on (Many, Too Many?) Small Technologies Loosely Joined: Open, Connected, and Social. This was carried out via Elluminate hosted at the University of Calgary. The players were D'Arcy Norman, Brian Lamb, myself, and Jim Groom and we had a nice peppy crowd show up there. When we brainstormed our topic, we ended up nostalgic and reflective of a show three of us did way back in 2004 on connecting decentralized web content with RSS — “Small Pieces Loosely Joined”– and almost laughing at how primitive some of the tools were back then! But the approach still rings true for us, maybe even more so today, that the path is not with large controlled systems, but the use, re-use, of separate systems and tools that we can connect using powerful underlying protocols like RSS and OPML. The approach for discussing [...]

This month’s issue of Wired had a small blurb in the PLaylist section on YASS (Yet Another Social Service): involver.com Sure, Twitter’s fine if you must know what your friends are doing right now. But what are they doing next week? Try involver.com, which lets you list events you plan to attend and tag them with keywords. So I tried.. It’s in beta. But a little digging around, and despite the “wait” link on the front, I made an account. It’s really for the people looking to connect with their friends who are going to concerts, ball games, etc. Based on a zipcode you enter in a profile and some tags, it lists local events that are happening in your area: It does a slick job of the social networking piece by tying things to your contacts, and it brings in event info (via RSS??) along with automatic Googlemapping of [...]

It’s hardly, hardly news anymore when a search in Google unveils the answer to a technical problem. But every time it happens, I get a tickle. Still. Like a newbie searcher. This borders on techno-trivia, but I’ve been working on some code that will allow us at NMC to create our own registration form to create accounts in Second Life, and then send the newbie avatars to our own Orientation island we are building (rather than the public place all other SL noobs land at– with the idea ours will be geared for educators). Linden Lab provides an API, some PHP code library, and some really meager code samples. The first test failed miserably- my form cut off right after the first call to one of the library functions. So its time to troll the web server error logs, which reveal a problem. The API transactions are done back and [...]

Bet yer Bloglines cannot do this! One of the features I treasured in my desktop RSS reader (back when I used NetNewsWire) was that it would periodically download the lastest feeds and store the content on my computer. This meant then if I was offline (e.g. on a plane), I could still browse and read the news. I had pretty much guessed that was not an option with a web-based browser. But on a recent plane trip, I discovered my guess was wrong. While waiting for my departing plane at Phoenix Sky Harbor Airport (where the offer free wireless in every terminal, take that you T-Mobile $$$ offered only other airports), I had opened my Google Reader and left the browser window open when I put the laptop to sleep. Later on flight, while using the computer, I looked for some reason at the browser — and was pleasantly surprised [...]

ozsgdcfp uvxjfloe yndvqk igctj nzvbsfod hqzploatu evsbkytc Yeah right, “omcv nxpy”, I could not agree more, there is nothing sweeter than the sound of comment blog spam frying in the moderation queue. Would you like some Grey Poupon on that?