CogBlogged from ‘June, 2007’

On rummaging through some bookmarks, I saw a number of sites I could barely remember, and a number of them were ones I had created accounts. This is the beginning of social software amnesia. For some reason, I decided to go back to one, slidez, which is not all that unique, but certainly works elegantly to allow you to upload images, annotate with titles and captions, and generate slide shows that can be shared. Just tossed in some images from my folder of desktop photos to make a slidezshow. That full sized one is pretty, and here is the embedded version provided by cut and paste: Free stuff, content served from Amazon s3 (which is seemingly a base for a lot of 2.0ish content), not bad. And maybe slipping back to the amnesia zone.

I love the idea of dotsub.com user generated video captioning — In the spirit of blog efficiency/laziness, I am copy/pasting what I‘ve just posted at the NMC Campus Observer: A few weeks ago we shared about a nifty new web video concept where uploaded video is set up so speakers of other languages can add localized captions. We are still impressed with the very 2.0ish idea that dotsub offers — user generated video captions. In our example, the folks at dotsub seeded our NMC Campus Seriously Engaging video with English captions from the original video (they did this in a very quick time frame, FYI). Just checking in today, I am seeing that someone has done 36% of the video in Italian: We are hoping with a bit of encouragement (nod nod, wink wink) that we can inspire speakers of the numerous other languages to jump in and try some [...]

Some interesting and funny too comments came in to my mini exploration of twitter friends to followers ratio. And vavoom, todays inbox has about 6 more friends notifications; of them maybe one I know and added. But get this, for those want to push the ratio even higher, is TwitterAdder with a new record of 15.44! That is 1853 friends with a scant 120 followers. And what is the tweet action? Well, it is self promotion (no crime, but virtue?) for TwitterAdder.com: Have you ever wanted more friends on your Twitter account? Now you can. Just enter your Twitter login details below and we’ll add 20 random friends to your account. which may explain recent rashes of friend requests from unknown origins. Call it TwitterFriendSpam? What is the desire to build up a huge list of “friends” (who are not really your friends)? C’mon, I bet some out there are [...]

This will prove I am not a statistician.. but I was mildly wondering today about patterns among people who twitter, as I glanced at my friends, as well as random people on the public timeline and the number of friends and followers on their pages. It seems there might be some behavior patterns there. Some generalizations: A lot of people in my circle have similar ratios of friends to followers, people perhaps shy? more selective, with ratios about 0.4-0.6. There are some more or less companies, entities using this solely to push content out; they have maybe one friend (so they are not really following others) and a few hundred followers, ratios < 0.2 Others have rather high ratios of friends to followers, > 1.0, even as high as 2.0 — these might be the uber socialites, the ones who seek to have as much as possible from other. Social [...]

It helps to sit back and take in how prolific the web has become- no it does not reach every world citizen and there are divides, indeed, but to lose sight of how it permeates culture and digs deeper all the time– well it means something to me to acknowledge it. What is ordinary today was really not even thinkable maybe 8 years ago. And it boggles the mind to flip the time frame forward and try to imagine where it will fling us. So not to drop down to the grandparent’s muttering of “I can remember slugging 10 pounds of raw HTML in bare feet through the snow”– I can distinctly remember when we did not see URLs on every ad, when people looked up phone numbers in this strange wast of paper known as “the phone book”, when booking a trip meant having to talk to a travel [...]

As social services spread, mutate, spawn like they are, I am sure I’m in the same boat as at least a few others– what was once novel and every peek drew attention, at what point do you draw the line? Do you automatically reciprocate any offered friendship? I;m pretty much connected with a good circle via twitter (have not heard peep form jaiku in a while, is there a pulse?), but I get about 2-3 offers a day, mostly form folks I don’t know, and have to admit I ignore a lot I cannot recognize from their ID in the offered email. Sorry if I offended a real friend of colleague, but when I get once from “Jacques Ami” who has about 2000 friends, I am a bo doubtful he/she is seeking a meaningful relationship. Just for fun, actually an un intended consequence, I have a small twitter Petri dish [...]

A D’Arcy Inspired History of Blog posted 23 Jun ’07, 10.42am MDT PST on flickr Riffing from D’Arcy’s idea and cleaner sketch, I tried mapping out the blog history of cogdogblog.com April 19, 2003: CogDogBlog 1.0 launched on maricopa server jade.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/alan using MovableType April 26, 2005 Migrated blog to WordPress (1.5) leaving old one as archive and moving new one to jade.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/cdb – Content was exported from MovableType (comments were not preserved) and imported into the new WordPress site. It sat for a while with a basic Kubrick Theme with a dog header ;-) The archive site (/alan) was re-templated to remove comments and to provide a redirect to the new WP version of same entry. Jul 20, 2005 – with idea from Steve Dembo, registered cogdogblog.com domain, for now, forwarding to the maricopa server Nov 11, 2005 – recast design using the current style, modified from the Headspace theme [...]

Tweet of the Day posted 20 Jun ’07, 3.56pm MDT PST on flickr I think this is worthy of a t-shirt, an award, a bumper sticker, a cartoon, a short story… Linktribution to Rob Wall Let’s take a vote. I vote for… “shunned”. My mom is not on facebook!

At one time I bemoaned a future of having multiple blogs to spread my self around. That was so 1.0. I have two personal ones (one just for running or complaining about it), three ones at NMC for various projects, plus our main drupal site which has blog like writing duties, plus others I am losing track of… But its a problem of my own making. And now a new one. I am multiple twittering. Is the “great sucking sounds” any remnant of time? like that I ought to be eating lunch right now or trying to clean the green from my swimming pool or …? So I have my own twittering at http://twitter.com/cogdog. For the 2007 NMC Summer Conference, I got jazzed to create a NMC specific twitter space, to play with displays like TwitterCamp, to aggregate stuff in places like Tumblr and pageflakes. But I see some more [...]

I’m too tired to even properly research this, but lately (?? weeks) I’ve been unable to get flickr to properly post blog posts to several of my WordPress blogs. Flickr keeps reporting my password may need to be changed, which is bunk as I know they are correct. With a little digging, I found an answer in the WordPress support forums that appears to work, but requires an edit to the xmlrpc.php file in your WP installation directory. After the first PHP statement of “define(‘XMLRPC_REQUEST’, true);” (inside the PHP tags), insert: if (phpversion()=="5.2.2") {   $GLOBALS['HTTP_RAW_POST_DATA'] = file_get_contents("php://input"); } Found buried in the WP forums, and references also http://bugs.php.net/bug.php?id=41293 and nothing I could find at flickr in their useless FAQ.