CogBlogged from ‘July, 2007’

In the Aimless Wander and Playing with Not Critical Web Site department, I plopped into gizmoz, a site where you upload an image of your face, and it digitizes it, and applies it to an animated avatar… you even add a short recording, and it syncs the animation to your words. The hardest part was getting a clean, license plate stare face shot (I ended up using PhotoBooth on my MacBookPro and cropping out the background in Photoshop). The interface is sort of fun to watch in the little animations it provides as a progress bar, sort of matrix-y code like flying by. It sure beats a blue bar. Anyhow, here is the CogDog Hitman: Express Yourself with Gizmoz Video Clips I have zero claim that this is of educational importance. Pure fun energizes me to return to some data crunching and formatting chores. Do you think that loser from [...]

Wow, it was yesterday that a tweet from HeyJude lead me to vodpod… today she does it again! Today’s tweet from her led me to TouchGraph GoogleBrowser, a web/java application that generates a visual relation map for web sites or searches based on Google data. Well, I think that is what it does. The site says: The TouchGraph Google Browser reveals the network of connectivity between websites, as reported by Google’s database of related sites. You enter a URL, it crunches a bit, and returns a node map with lines to sites that are “similar” according to Googly nuggets. So, of course, in the spirit of egosurfing, the first thing I try is a search on http://cogdogblog.com/ So in proximity are many of the blogs I am most friendly with, many of them fine Canadians (!) and reveals a set of other “networks” of close affinity, such as the purple [...]

Loser

I’ve had a number of months of quiet resignation of the ever constant flow of email spam (now unreadable PDFs of stock offers, still sweet deals to enlarge body parts I am not equipped with, great sounding mortgage offers for homes I don’t own in Florida), not to mention the torrent of blog spam that I watch over the 10 or so blogs and wikis I touch. But a trackback I got today to a link farm, a place designed to only generate internal links to itself (via spam insertion to innocent blogs) is just the kind of smelly roach that fired me up. Al pages on the infernal site are self linking, each one laced with Google AdSense links, in the marginal hopes some fool might click and generate some nano revenue for the roach-a-teers. So a blog post I posted today contained a NMC presentation that had a [...]

I love it when curious link clicking reveals unknown gems! It happened again just an hour ago, with the result of a great video collection tool. Almost by sheer accident- discovered following a tweet by Judy O’Connell to her web 2.0 presentation on Slideshare, that I came across this nifty new site, vodpod. Here you can create your own “pods” of video collections, and with their one click browser tools, you can create collections of web video from 1000s of different video sites, YouTube, Google, MySpace, just about anywhere that embeds flash video. You can do some customization of your “pod”, have categories, tags, comments– and it provides a cut and paste method to embed a “widget” in a blog- see the sidebar here under the flickr images, showing the most recently added videos. This is perfect for upcoming October workshops I am doing in Australia, under the pseudonym of [...]

Sit, Avatar! posted 11 Jul ’07, 6.54pm MDT PST on flickr I was experimenting today with doing some live video streaming from my laptop into Second Life. That darned dog just refused to listen to my commands. Some virtual dogs are just like their real life versions.

Summary: Jakob Nielsen tosses gasoline on the flames of the blogosphere by claiming blog posting dilutes an arbitrary measure of “expertise”. A thousand blog monkeys were deeply hurt. Oh Jacob Nielsen, you had to know upon writing “Write Articles, Not Blog Postings” the ire and furor it would stir up…. well, since he likely only reads articles by experts, perhaps not. I first came across reference of the articles form some of the smackbacks in my RSS feeds, and in a reading of hiss article, he actually articulates and demonstrates his point rather clearly. His argument- if you are that “expert” in your field of 1000 peers, in the 99% percentile, because blog posts can vary in quality, even among such shining, pristine experts, that sometimes a 14 year old kid in Korea will out write you sometime in the blogosphere. Horrors! So what one ought to do, according to [...]

There’s no shortage at all of cool new tools to create and express yourself on the web. I came across Voicethread via a link from Tim Lauer (linktribution!). From its site: A VoiceThread is an online media album that allows people to make comments, either audio or text, and share them with anyone they wish. A VoiceThread allows an entire group’s story to be told and collected in one place. Basically you upload photos (integration from flickr allows you to pull them directly from a set there, nice), and the flash editing interface allows you to add audio narration to images, which play back as a slideshow. I took a brief tour of the features via the What is a VoiceThread anyhow. The zoom and pan capability on the images reminded me a little of the feature in the Pachyderm software, not quite the level of zoom that Pachy has, [...]

I’m sure the old white hairs who pull the strings at Big Business sit back in the leather chairs of the country club, and fondly remember the pre-internet days. Back then, customers had no easy access to information about companies their practices, and they sure could not publish their pesky complaints to a place where millions read them. That has changed, as covered in the March 2007 Wired Issue on Companies who embrace (or abhor) “Radical Transparency”. But still, and I doubt I am the only one, when trying to address a customer service issue with a company, you can feel like their entire structure is meant to frustrate you into just giving up. Of course, this post is headed down the road of my own petty complaint (hey, that’s what blogs are for, right?), a mere molecule dropped into the ocean of customers. I have a mobile phone. In [...]

A Cheap Lynnetter Knockoff posted 3 Jul ’07, 12.04am MDT PST on flickr Play is integral to this thing we call "work" in the new net space, not bounded by walls, old rules of behavior, etc. Where is the carefully drawn line between work and play? Dr Angela Thomas recognizes this dynamic of pleasure and power — see this slide from her presentation on Pleasure, Play, Parcipation and Promise: www.slideshare.net/anya/nmc-summer2007 Original Image creative commons licensed "untitled" by flickr user hexodus. Note- this was a quick and dirty attempt to see if I could really create something akin to the Interesting Snippets collection by LynnetteR. The edits were done by the flickrCC tool – a search and edit flickr web app. It finds flickr images that allow modifications and provides a basic web editing interface. It’s not exactly easy to use (note my typo and sloppy spacing), but I was able [...]