CogBlogged from ‘July, 2007’

Last time I checked, the toe was into learning objects, but now it is FB bound? Why not. Flickr is in Facebook. Slideshare just entered Facebook. Twitter has been there a while. My dog is in there. The parade goes on and on. I am nodding in agreement with Stephen with some skepticism as to the impact of so many social network things surrounding us. Tied up in Wires flickr photo by zoethustra But I am in torn. On one hand, I am impressed with this ability of a web social network that allows you to customize it with plug and play widgets that connect with other web content. It does it in a very slick manner. I wasted about an hour one day adding all the places I have been to my travel map. It was addictive. The ease of expanding your social network is honed to a fine [...]

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Over the years, angry blog posts about spam is my most frequent blog post activity (well, until Twitter came out). I’ve been long resigned to scripted onslaughts of attempts to insert unwanted content into the comment space as a SFOL (Sad Fact of Life). For the most part, I’ve had excellent luck with Spam karma 2 catching most spam and keeping it from my pages. 27,000 spams eaten in maybe 3 years, oi! But each one results in an email that at first excites me (wow, a real person had something really to say!) which today turned to sour grape juice 10 times with a series of comments like “pjtxgw qbvxdmac fkzv zdmltnav ouiszlfmj qfidsozar oapzfsdb” or “”. What’s weird is that the URLs inserted are gibberish too. My only guess is they attempt to foist an approved comment past a sleepy blog writer, and once the gate is open, [...]

No, this is not something to gross you out. Who is Sick is a mashup of google maps and people’s self reports of their illness– it provides some data so supposedly you could find out if that queasy feeling in your stomach is…. well something a lot of people in the hood are keeping down. It’s got tags! It’s got tell a friend! It’s got Google Maps! Let’s see what’s hanging over Scottsdale– lots of runny nose / cough action. Better wear a mask out there.

What could be better than a good bone? How about Dogbook? Cadu is now part of my profile! Woo! Linktribution to Beth, thanks! So will everything find its way to Facebook? Will it consume Yahoo, Google, the very earth itself?

To the “person” who laboriously took the time, thought, passion, to craft this slow- roasted comment: jshucwk muenyzck lfdjrkzv pjirmq hyakosr jcrensg fvdtahqo I can only reply: obɥɐʇpʌɟ ƃsuǝɹɔɾ ɹsoʞɐʎɥ bɯɹıɾd ʌzʞɹɾpɟl ʞɔzʎuǝnɯ ʞʍɔnɥsɾ It will simmer forever in my Spam Karma 2 steamer, never to see the light of anything google-able.

I pretty much just delete most twitter friends requests… I already track most of the folks I want to. But after about the 6th or 7th “Xxxxxx is following you” message from the same person, I got a creepy feeling like someone was breathing bad breath down my neck. If I have little patience for blog spam, twitter spam is down there as well: I visited this spam tweeter, but only to block them. What happens? Are you sure you want to block this person? Here’s what blocking means: * You will no longer show up in the blocked person’s list of friends. * Your updates won’t show up on the blocked person’s profile page. * The blocked person will not be able to add you as a friend. Perfect. Go away. And brush your teeth or buy a mint, damnit.

Okay, tonight’s blog parade is back to back twitter-a-thon. Among the tweets, Darren mentioned getting Twittercamp to run on his laptop. I chimed in a smart remark about stepping it up a notch and modifying the app with a custom skin. Oops, I may have jumped ahead. Twittercamp is a nifty desktop application created with Adobe’s new Apollo technology (allows web interaction in slick desktop apps) originally created by Daniel Dura as a way of having on ongoing dynamic display of twitter activity for use during a conference. If you happen to have a nice plasma screen laying around, it makes for a nifty backdrop for people to look at during breaks, etc. (Keep in mind you can only see it running on a computer, not in the browser, you have the real twitter for that??). I had downloaded it and ran it when it cam out, filing it away [...]

It’s just an un-scientific hunch, but twitter seems to “got game”. Jaiku flickered and faded. Pownce came out with a nice interface, threads, but I’m still tuned to twitter. It’s this dog’s rule that there is never a ‘best’ technology, just the one you happen to be using at the time. It’s going to all by transient for the next millennium or so. Recently I’ve been using on a twitter process I’ve not really heard described or even mentioned (that’s not to say it has not happened, as I am not the all seeing Orb). I’m thinking about the process when you’ve been away from twitter for a while (for some that means 3 hours, for others, it is days or more). You come back at the end of a raft of distended, semi-unraveled conversations. Of course we are used to reverse chronology in blog posts, but those are large [...]

Just when you think you’ve seen enough cool flickr add on tools, 20 more pop up in your reader. SlideFlickr is very handy- ir can generate code for emdedding and flickr set into an external web page, but you can also create embeddable shows based on tags an d other parameters. Or as the site says, and it is true- SlideFlickr will help you create and embed Flickr slideshows in less than 10 seconds. Here is one generated in 4 seconds (!) from my Being There presentation / set: