CogBlogged from ‘July, 2007’

Now I am Comfortable posted 27 Jul ’07, 8.09am MDT PST on flickr New Puppy X gets ready for first night with her new family. Puppy X needs a name. Operators are standing by.

Time to dust off your memory cells for how the Period Table of the Elements is organized — but now it is mashedup, recast, and graphicly spun into a new version where websites replace the elements. Get ready to play with the Periodic Table of the Internet: It’s really fun, and interactive, and an interesting (and debatable) in structure. Like the columns of the chemical table, the ‘net table has defined “groups” that are not associated by atomic structure, but function, like I for Search Engines, IV for Aggregators, XIII for Blogs, etc, and their row is according to “rank” – (which rank is not clear– and how the *%#^$ does Yahoo sit above Google?) Anyhow, it makes for a fun visual for talking about the web, each element is hyperlinked. Now my mind is wondering- how do these elements combine… do they form new compounds? Like NtFr2- New York [...]

My $0.00 Under the Desk Organizer posted 25 Jul ’07, 3.37pm MDT PST on flickr Always in the spirit of being (acting?) organized, I decided to move some things off the top fo my desktop to underneath like the DSL modem (which needs rare attention) and my USB / Firewire external drives. As much as I try to bundle and clamp wires. it always ends up a jungle down there. My shelf solution uses two wood doors from kitchen cabinets long gone, and supports from some un-used bricks. While moving all this stuff around (which began simply by a desire to add a DSL filter to the phone line in an effort to cut some annoying phone buzz), I began pulling wires, moving stuff underneath. it just so happens while re-plugging phone/ethernet lines, my Qwest service must have blinked out, as one phone went dead (the fax line was good) [...]

I’ve been fond of Slideshare for months, and have been meeting to blog about how they’ve quielty rolled in social networking features, but their newly announced feature today of providing the ability to upload and synchronize sound to slides is the proclaimed Killer App Kick All the Others in the Butt. What they have done in offering the ability to create Slidecasts is to create essentially what was so great back in 2003 with what was then known as Macromedia Breeze, which was then known as big bucks software to use. Now you can do exactly what one could do in Breeze… on the web… for free! So since I had just posted last night about my goal to provide a workshop on 50 Web 2.0 Ways to Tell a Story — adding the audio to my posted presentation was a snap. The MP3 needs to be sitting at a [...]

I am sidestepping some of my own blog advice by blogging something that’s not fully ready for prime time. Among my frantic evening time prep work for my October Australia tour, I am starting to weave together workshop / presentation materials I’ll likely leak here first to get some feedback. What seemed like an off the cuff idea, and mostly because I just liked the title, I am working on a workshop activity called “There Must be 50 Web2.0 Ways to Tell a Story” – the premise being to introduce participants to at least 50 sites that allow them to assemble at least two kinds media as a story and republish it to other web sites. About a week or so of digging around got me at least 54 candidates. So for those missing the musical allusion here, it is a nod to the elegant lyrics of Paul Simon, re-purposed [...]

I smiled as I sent this to the spam folder: Hello my friend! I am ready to kill myself and eat my dog, if medicine prices here (http://____________.cn) are bad. Look, the site and call me 1-800 if its wrong.. My dog and I are still alive :) Wow, I was really worried about that dog. And they say there is no good writing on the net.

I Am, Like So Insignificant posted 23 Jul ’07, 8.52pm MDT PST on flickr I do not register on Google Trends: www.google.com/trends?q=cogdogblog Sigh. Poking around the Google Labs, I played a bit the other night with the search trend analysis tools they have there-might come in handy in some future presentation. With Google Trends, you can compare the world’s interest in your favorite topics. Enter up to five topics and see how often they’ve been searched on Google over time. Google Trends also shows how frequently your topics have appeared in Google News stories, and in which geographic regions people have searched for them most. Google Trends analyzes a portion of Google web searches to compute how many searches have been done for the terms you enter, relative to the total number of searches done on Google over time. We then show you a graph with the results — our [...]

Our local paper carries a Monday morning local column on computers, most of the time covering those critical questions on spyware and video drivers for Vista. But the writer sometimes looks at the Internet (with a Capital I), and today I was curious to read the take on social networks. You had my riding down nostalgia lane with the opening: The Internet, often referred to as the “Information Superhighway.” is bulging with information that grows exponentially every day. Really? Maybe me and Gomer should check out this new fangled Information Hghway. When was the last time you heard someone call the net the “Information Superhighway?” I was instantly transported back to the early 1990s when the (before we had enough people on the net to make a meme) phrase was coined by Al Gore (long before his pseudo claim to inventing it). At the time I thought it was silly [...]

I had completely forgotten that I’ve had the bits installed on this blog to capture data in Google Analytics, which for the paranoid means your browsing habits are feeding the big G machine (not the purpose of today’s meanderings). In fact, I doubt I had looked at the reports at all, but they do contain an incredible amount of data, if that is your quantitative type of fun (I’d rather roll in the mud, myself). Fortunately, they have a lot of visuals ;-) So for the past month, my readership seems to be going out of phase with the stock market: So from June 21 to July 21, 2007, some 2790 people actually ventured here, or as my use of division suggests, about 104 per day. Wow, who are you? Analytics provides all kinds of breakdowns, by country (my readers are from 85 countries, mostly US, Canada, U.K. Australia, Germany, [...]

My wife was at a dinner recently– she ran nto an old friend and colleague we’d not heard from in a while. Eduardo mentioned “but I read Alan’s blog all the time…”, so Eduardo, this blog post is for you to see if you are there- send me an email and our next lunch meet up is on me ;-) And the quality of the restaurant increases if you post a comment ;-) And this has me thinking a bot more about blog commenting… time to fish for some data (next barking).