CogBlogged from ‘May, 2007’

I’m only one of billions who loves Google Maps. They find things, you can overlay satellite images. But what if you could really peek in an see what is there? Now you can* with the Street View option (*in limited areas). You can place a little icon person on the map, and get a fully navigable view of what is in the street! Because the example I saw was in Manhattan, and for a friend traveling there I had been trying to remember a funky bar I used to frequent as a college student there for a summer in the 1980s, I took a tour…. But I could not remember the address of the “Ear Bar” (outside hung a neon sign that read “BAR” and part of it was painted black so it light up as “EAR”. So a little Google search found the address as 326 Spring Street. I [...]

I’m going to get worried when email spammers finally develop good writing skills. Today, I earned another pile of money, a million pounds courtesy of Microsoft (hey they have gazillions to spare, believable, eh?) Dumb spamming, or How to Spam Like a Moronic Dummy: Use a forged emailed address that is from cox.net? dead giveaway. Dumb. I think Microsoft is a big enough company to use their own email systems Use bad grammar- “The prestigious Microsoft”– why not “The Great and Powerful (ignore the man behind the curtain) Microsoft” More bad grammar. No one uses correct tense, least of all Microsoft? Does this mean they did not use grammar check in Outlook? Dumb. Oh, supply “serial numbers and your drew the luck number” Just grammatically brilliant. Beyond Dumb, Dumb as a doorpost. Suspicious contact info. “Mr Kyle Hitchens” lists his email as kylehitchenss@yahoo.de (c.f. #1 above for email address)– and [...]

I leave in a few days for the 2007 NMC Summer Conference in Indianapolis. This is actually a minor test of blogging into the wind to see if Technorati picks up the conference tag of nmc2007 (I still am never 100% sure if it will pick up tagged blog posts). But yay! it looks like the simple WP plugin I used, then broke, Bunny’s Technorati Tags, is functional in WordPress 2.x — I like its simplicity of just tagging when I feel like it; my categories are not all that coherent to warrant an Ultimate Tag Warrior approach (call me a tag wimp rather than warrior). So for those bloggers, flickerites, and del.icio.us markers, remember to tag a whole boat load of stuff with nmc2007. I have the duct tape and bailing wire Tag This Conference page set up to receive tagged stuff, and am also testing a tumblr site [...]

posted 16 Jan ’06, 3.02pm MST PST on flickr And now for something not related at all to blogging, twittering, or education technology at all. Way too long after Al’s Keynote jived movie, I finally got around to doing my small bit and swapping out some of our incandescent light bulbs for fluorescent ones. We’d already done our bedrooms/.offices, which each have ceiling fan/light combos (and we use 2 bulbs rather than three), but I’ve been eyeballing our other rooms… The kitchen has 6 R30 spots (1/2 were already fluorescent, forgot we bought them), 2 R20 spots over the counter. Then there is track lighting in the dining room and living room, each room with 2 sets of tracks each with 3 spotlights in the R20 size. Then there are these dressing room lights in our bathroom vanities (5 in one room, 6 in another). Yikes, this is mounting up [...]

flickr creative commons photo Raising the Flag by selyfriday This has nothing to do with McDonalds, but I loved the flickr image so much, I’m making a metaphorical stretch. No, this is a clarion call to Remember the Blog! As we get more distributed in where our e-attention goes, be it various social networks, virtual worlds, and more recently twitter, I’m wondering, as are others, about a decline in blogging. Steve Rubel pondered, posed the question (on twitter). Now, here’s where it gets interesting. Will people spend less time writing or reading blogs and more time Twittering? I posed this question on Twitter and got a resounding no. I am not so sure. The Guardian reported a summary of the Gartner report suggesting blogging is on the decline New research by Gartner, the US technology analyst, suggests the number of new blogs peaked in October and that an estimated 200m [...]

This barking is only partly about twitter. Well, actually its not about twitter at all, but I think I can satisfy some sanity overload by mentioning twitter 3 times in my first three sentences. Over the long Memorial Day weekend here in the states, I’ve spent almost no time on the computer, and not much on twitter either. I’m not feeling any shakes of withdrawal or anguish over “missing out.” A shrug seems to take care of it. But offline, I’ve been mulling over my friend and colleague Scott Leslie’s “my twitter curve” post from end of the week. Actually, its generated 2 different blog post ideas, so call this “Part Uno”. Like many people, Scott got rather fed up with twitter’s erratic (to say the least) behavior, where it was either unavailable (stupid cat photos in the server photo; ahem, which are no longer cute or funny), and worse, [...]

My Faculty Academy presentation “Being There: nets, tweets, avatars” is getting some eyeballs where it is sitting in slideshare. Just got a note that it is now listed on their featured presentations page and has me thinking I should comb back through and make sure I’ve not done something typical like mispelling my own name ;-) I am blushing, this dog is shy and hates attention. I might need to take a bath now or comb my hair. I like what slideshare does, that it can YouTube like be embedded into web pages and blog posts and is the only, only, ONLY, O-N-L-Y reason I would ever touch Powerpoint, but with its lack of embedding URLs, it really is less useful as a sharing platform than the slides posted in flickr. C’mon, slideshare, give us hyperlinks!

Uh-oh, my 15 minutes of fame on TV is out and might be up. As previously noted, a few weeks back, I flew in and out of San Jose to be a panelist on the Ready2Net panel on “Web 2.0 Comes to Campus” (Drat you Bryan Alexander, likely too busy yourself, you should have been there instead of me!). Gulp its out. A chance to see me in a tie for the first time in 6 years (and maybe the last in even more): “Web 2.0 ummm,.. is ummmm. well ummm…” The entire show is now online — note that the first half was the “industry” panel, with speakers from Microspft, Blackboard, etc on their perspective on web2… then the academics. I cannot say for sure if I said anything memorable, besides, “In Second Life I am a dog!”, but I thank Casey Green and the crew from CSU Montery [...]

My how the web 2.0 winds blow. It’s been about a week since my last blog post about twitter (sounds sort of like a confessional- “post 5 hail tweets and…”). Last week, right during the first day of Faculty Academy, twitter got really flaky. It would display tweets, but most tweets made just went into the place where lost socks go. Oops, time for a tangent. Did you know there is a Missing Socks Bureau? The Bureau of Missing Socks is the first organization solely devoted to solving the question of what happens to missing single socks. It explores all aspects of the phenomena including the occult, conspiracy theories, and extraterrestrial. We offer support for the matching sock deprived, and catalog, research, index and document all extant material related to socks since the dawn of the shoe. Our audio visual department is the largest multi media center in Hollywood and [...]

Badge of Honor posted 17 May ’07, 9.45pm MDT PST on flickr You have no idea how much honor there was in being a part of Faculty Academy Sitting in the Richmond airport, sipping the free wifi on my way home to Phoenix, I am still swimming in the euphoric high of having the honor to have been a part of the University of Mary Washington’s Faculty Academy- 2 days of tech-teach-learn-love fest. On the ride to the airport, I joked with Jim Groom that it was almost a religious experience (keep in mind I hang out at a UU congregation). This is even twice as funny as people refer to him her as “Reverend Jim” for his passionate “preaching” of the power of WordPress (T-shirts are available). So mentally, in my tired brain is a long list of things worth blogging about, like the crafted “slow blogging” approach I [...]