CogBlogged from ‘August, 2007’

Like Duvall’s Kilgore, who said “there’s nothing like napalm in the morning”, for a web geek, there’s nothing like a bit of curious fiddling with code to make something work. Today’s feat was finagling a MediaWiki extension to display a Google Calendar in our sites. I’ve been using GCal for a year to manage our Second Life events, and Google provides the cut and past code to put in other sides, like our WordPress blog – but MediaWiki is not going to be happy with some <iframe> code, so on some searching I found reference to one on the CouchSurfing Wiki – yet was discouraged that their demo was busted: Going back to the Google search well, I came on the listing of same code in the MediaWiki collection and it suggested that the calendar ID entered in the tags had changed. So there was hope. Setting up MediaWiki extensions [...]

I am now owner of a plot of land in Second Life, 4096 sq meters on a new sim called “Sciences”, one of the NMC Educational Communities (land that is parceled and rented to educational organizations). As of tonight I have spent extensive amount of time walking the green carpet and tossing out objects. Actually I was there for about 20 minutes. Seriously (or semi-seriously), I have been involved in Second Life since March 2006, but mostly in a role of working with our NMC events, managing media, and running group activities. I have not really built anything, thought I like to boast about the quality of my plywood cubes. I have tinkered a bit with some scripting. But now I have a space to tinker, to express, or just to mess around in. There is an intoxicating allure of this as some virtual level of power?? Maybe, maybe not. [...]

Pshaw to bloggers who cut off or dont harvest their comments! I got rich today! Thanks to Matt M who commented on my “Anyone Remember Podcasting” post, he pointed my to EveryZing- as search services that does keyword searches among audio and video content — and returns results that are linked directly to the segment that matches. It appears they achieve this feat by using speech to text technology yielding a transcript which can then be indexed for searching. I thought I had seen this before in a site called Podzinger, and checking the old links there, I find they are one and the same. So for an example, if I am searching for casts that mention NMC, I do a search for “New Media Consortium” (using quotes to phrase search), and a get a list of results, along with a “Play here 3:32″ link that loads a player cued [...]

You know about email spam. You cannot avoid it, you cannot Can it, you cannot toss it though it is passed the expiration date, and you cannot even make a decent sandwich with it. But you know what this is, blog readers? That is my breakfast, yum, it is “Bacn”! Yes, the new hot meme talk is about Bacn “email you want- but not right now” – from the official site– Bacn is a new problem now plaguing our email inboxes. Putting it simply, Bacn is email you receive that isn’t spam… And isn’t personal mail. It’s the middle class of email. It’s notifications of a new post to your Facebook wall or a new follower on Twitter. It’s the Google alert for your name and the newsletter from your favorite company. We are a group of like-minded individuals who have realized the problem of bacn, and are out to [...]

Uncanny Dog Valley posted 23 Aug ’07, 6.17pm MDT PST on flickr The book, Lives of Monster Dogs was recommend to me last week by someone (sorry, forgot who) at the NMC Symposium on Creativity in Second Life. And 2008 is nigh for the arrival of the Dogs: "A postmodern Mary Shelley, taking the parable of Frankenstein’s monster several giant steps farther, might have written this fable of a novel about a tragic race of monster dogs–in this case, genetically and biomechanically engineered dogs (of several major breeds). Created by a German mad scientist in the 19th century, the monster dogs possess human intelligence, speak human language, have prosthetic humanlike hands and walk upright on hind legs. The dogs’ descendants arrive in New York City in the year 2008, still acting like Victorian-era aristocrats. Most important, the monster dogs suffer humanlike frailties and, ultimately, real suffering more serious and affecting [...]

91%How Addicted to Blogging Are You? Mingle2 – mingle Thanks to Rob (linktribution), I have exact data on the problem. My blogging here has been sporadic due to blogging directed elsewhere… After our week long conference held in Second Life (I hear you snickering out there)… I was blogged out having tried to blog the summaries of events over at the NMC Campus Observer, at least the 9 hours worth of a 12 hour schedule per day I was present. It was another 2 days of catch up, editing recorded audio, syncing a few slideshare sessions, pushing about 500 images to flickr… Yes, whether you nod with Forbes.com that everyone in Second Life is a loser or sweep broadly with brush strokes that it’s “just cyber sex and gambling”, we feel it is important to actually give this environment a good run before dismissing it so candidly. So we ran [...]

Wirecast at Work posted 21 Aug ’07, 5.37pm MDT PST on flickr For the NMC Symposium on Creativity in Second Life, I put Wirecast to the test. As a streaming video solution, it allows me to broadcast a window of a desktop application, in this case Second Life, out to our streaming server (a hosted XServe), much like QuickTime Broadcaster can do as a free app, but with so much more….. Broadcaster cannot do an app window, and Wirecast allows you to dynamically compose layered effects (title screens) and switch between video sources with transitions. Audio was a bit trickier. Larry was talking via our streaming audio serverm which was not captured as output anywhere in Wirecast– until I remembered Soundflower, the free app that creates virtual sound channels. In my Mac Sound panel, I set the default output to SoundFlower, which I could then pick up as an audio [...]

Google Trends on “podcasting” Podcasting is passe? No, the use of audio is not, but as a “hot trend” …..? I’ve always had mixed feelings about podcasting- as a strung together series of technologies- publishing audio in format associated with RSS that could be automatically downloaded, and optionally moved to a portable device– that I loved. What got messy was that for a while, almost any use of an mp3 on a web site as slapped with a verb of “podcasting”. In the vein of podcasting as a practice- I am at the zero level. I don’t subscribe to any feeds. Now that I’ve started up some running again, I am listening again, but my habits are more browse and pluck / download, then subscribe en masse. I cannot think of anyone really I am that dedicated to listening to on a regular basis I don’t even have a fancy [...]

I think I have a new mode of developing my workshops and presentations, which of course, does not involve crafting it way ahead of time– but rather than doing my planning, and taking my best shot at it, I am now just tossing out some half baked ideas, picking up feedback/suggestions, and asking people to look at half done wiki pages. Call me lazy (I do), but I think in this realm, that there is a severe contradiction and pitfall of one person being “experted” in such a fluid, moving, organic, ever expanding at a rate exceeding the speed of light (last one was hyperbole), thing such as web 2.0 (whatever that is). No one can, no one. If they say they are an expert, put on the liar detection goggles. For my upcoming October trip down under, of course folks are asking me to be such an expert. From [...]

I’ve been using email, I think since my undergrad days at University of Delaware, maybe 1981 or 1982.. I know for sure I had a BITNET email at Arizona State when I got there in ’87. E-mail, spam, the sheer volume of junk is a pain, but ot one I can yet say I am ready to live without, yet one has to wonder, since Ray Tomlinson supposedly emailed “QWERTYUIOP” how long its arc will last. This was really brought to my mind with two incidents- one was a very much email like message that came to me from a colleague via Facebook. For this person, their institutional email system is so bad, so unusable, that FB is a preferred alternative. Does that tell you anything about needs for user experience design? The second is I am now getting regular messages from people via direct messages via Twitter. To reply, [...]