CogBlogged from ‘May, 2007’

My twitter addiction is right on course. I can (ahem) quit at anytime, just not today. Or tomorrow. Or… For sheer failure of seeing my calculated negative allotment of free time grow even more negative, I have greatly resisted digging into the worlds of MySpace and Facebook — but decided for some curiosity and just because I cannot advocate commenting from the outside- I signed up at Facebook. This was really prompted by some stats shared by D’Arcy and Cole about the amazingly high percentage use of FB at their institutions (like in the 80% range). That is rather scary in some sense, considering data Ive seen and collected suggested blog activity at edu being more like in the 15-20% range. But I am not spending much time in facebook, not looking for friends or parties or photos of XXXXX. The bits I have seen indicate they have the social [...]

New business cards are ordered… I have a new title on my role at NMC as “Vice President, Community & CTO” reflecting a constructive look at work I’ve been doing in the last 13 months and where NMC is going in the future. For now, I’m doing the same stuff and cashing the same check, but a new title feels good. I like the emphasis where my interest lies- in supporting, maintaining, nudging our various online (and F2F) communities. My colleague Rachel and I have had some laughs about our families at home having to ask us, “Can the Vice President wash the dishes now / empty the trash / pick up the dog poop in the back yard / …. ?” Sorry, gotta run. Dick Cheney is IM-ing about our hunting trip next weekend ;-)

In the “Crazy Scheduling — I Thought I was Learning to Say No” department, I am lined up to be a participant on a May 17 webcast of the Ready2Net program on “Web 2.0 Comes to Campus” – the free series of webcast and satellite broadcasts produced by the CSU-Monterey Bay. As billed: Is Web 2.0 yet another wave of IT Industry jargon? Or must campuses pay attention? What will it mean to “harness network efforts” to enhance campus resources and services and to improve student learning opportunities? Corporations are taking a broad look at Web 2.0 as a way to transform IT resources and services. Do the corporate conversations about Web 2.0 apply to higher education? And if so, in what ways? At what costs? And with what benefits for students, faculty, and institutions? This R2N program examines the shift in Internet platform, content and users, and serves to [...]

I’ve tried for months to get the WordPress PodPress plugin to behave- on multiple sites it just plum refuses to embed the player in the page. Every option is set to display the player, I can see it in the source, and it fails. And it seems like it gets upgraded once a week, each a complete download and replace of a gizillion files. The only advantage it appeared to offer was ability to generate iTunes formatted feeds, something we’ve not really desperately needed. On a new podcast focused site I am working on, I am switching to the Anarchy Media Player- and it Just Works.

This is an old, tired, dog beaten story on this blog, but for the umpteenth time I’ve had to modify some web form that sis et up to collect data, because some script junkie decided to fill the form fields with PPC URLS (links to porn, pills, casinos, the un-holy trinity). It’s all in the hopes that web forms will actually post the content somewhere to a web page, which then improves, in theory, the Google Rank for the spammers slimy client. It must work, as it would not be tried if not. And for the umpteenth umpteenth time, I must wag my paw at Google, since they provide the financial incentive that robs many a blogger and small time web owner of time spent dealing with form spam. This is what I had to do this morning, on a form that does nothing but collect some contact information, and [...]

What seem like everyday occurrences of connectivity across the web would have been beyond my wildest dreams back in the mid 1990s when just hand coding web pages and linking was intoxicating enough. I almost forgot about this interesting series of small events. In late march of this year, our daffodils started blooming up at our cabin in the pine forests of north/central Arizona. Like clockwork, I was taking some photos and posting to flickr on March 23. That same day, I got an email from Kaitlin: My name is Kaitlin and I work for NowPublic.com. I’m working on a story about Ireland’s Daffodil Day, an annual event that raises funds for cancer research and treatment. I’d like to use your photo of a daffodil to help compliment my story. NowPublic is a news sharing community that relies on stories, photos, & videos from people like you. Would you be [...]

I just got self distracted, not in twittter, but twiddling here with the blog. For quite some time, I have rigged together a ‘Page’ in WordPress that uses a RSS feed with info on all the presentations I’ve done going back to 2003. This was generated by sending the feed to the Feed2JS site to dynamically make the page. I’m writing up notes here how it was done- the new thang is up at http://cogdogblog.com/best.php What I did not like was that it grew rather long, so I decided to make it be a PHP script that would dynamically do the right thing per year. The first step was breaking up a long single XML file into smaller files, one per year, e.g. 2003, 2004, … 2007. Just cut n’ paste. The idea is to have a web form in the page that presents a menu one can choose from- [...]

As promised, I went almost 24 hours without blogging about twitter. Today again, revealed some gems – a FireFox plugin that allows submitting tweets from the search bar; Rob documenting some real time action that were spawned by twitter exchanges… A bunch of colleagues plunged on board, full of their predictable twitter recidivism. Most people tend to describe it as “people writing about what they are doing” as if these are just things people yell out into the void, like the guy screaming from a corner post about the end of the world. Experience shows this is not the case, as people are being conversational, not just blandly saying, “I am eating a bagel” (well there are those). So in some sense to me, in terms of it being a way, each day, I have discovered a new blog, a new technology tool, that its more like RSS, with some [...]

This notification creeps me out. Should I expect a manila brown envelope with incriminating photos? ;-) Be careful with your verbs on web sites.

I promise this is the last thing I will blog about twitter…. today. Moreso than the back and forth about twitter being the Signpost of Doom that People Need to Get a Life, vs the It’s Just Great to Banter with People I Like, it is amazing how quickly it is moving as a techno-meme. Just watching the increased rate of contact messages, how many more tweets spill when I flip back mid-day. I am just plain fascinated to watch it explode, not caring if it folds like a limp tortilla tomorrow or if eventually those Obvious dudes buy out Google. It’s like having some sort of social behavior laboratory right in front of you. So some curious things I have seen twitter on by. Yesterday, Tom Hapgood emailed me and asked for some comments about twitter on his blog, which at that time was full of your typical responses [...]