CogBlogged from ‘August, 2007’

Talking About Machinima posted 12 Aug ’07, 11.49pm MDT PST on flickr NMC Symposium on Creativity in Second Life, Aug 12-18, 2007 I know folks are rather polarized in terms of being wildly excited about Second Life or being totally dismissive of it. Rather than just pontificating or bikcering about it, I’m more excited to be a part of giving it an experimental full bore run — this is is something the NMC can and does do. So this week, we are running an entire conference in the world of Second Life, our Symposium on Creativity. Today we opened it with a round of our “studio” sessions (more below), and a reception at our newly designed “NMC Conference Center”. It was not without snafus. At the time for our studio classes to start, suddenly no one was able to teleport (transport) from one place to another. A number of people [...]

Ah, my poor RSS Reader, not nearly given the devoted attention once reserved for it. Maybe a year, maybe two ago, I’d focus on at least scanning all my sources and marking them read by end of the day, even if it was in one fell keyboard stroke. That was BT (Before Twitter), BSL (Before Second Life), Bd (Before drupal), BR5WPS (Before Running 5+ WordPress Sites). That’s not to say IO dont regularly mine the feed pile, but there are heaps of unread, unseen items down the list. I have noticed my Feed Readin’ pattern has shifted, some to the features of Google Reader. Before, I would organize my subscriptions into folder categories, but still pretty much process one feed’s (one blog, one news source) titles at the same time. I was reading DOWN the feeds. Nothing wrong with that, but it is in some ways a legacy of the [...]

Thanks, Intellagirl, thanks… I’ve been tagged for an “8 Random Things About Me” meme.The rules are: 1) Post these rules before you give your facts 2) List 8 random facts about yourself 3) At the end of your post, choose (tag) 8 people and list their names, linking to them 4) Leave a comment on their blog, letting them know they’ve been tagged So here are my 8 random things: I loathe web memes like this. Actually I am jealous since every meme I tried to start died in the chute. I’m getting a bit more bald and am in total denial. As a kid I had at least 11 pairs of goldfished named Wilbur and Orville. None ever flew (oh one Wilbur did, jumped out of the bowl) and none lived longer than 2 weeks. Beets make me barf. I’ve taken about 95% of my photos the last 5 [...]

As much as I complain about getting shafted by lousy customers service and shlocky telephone answer trees, it is well worth my time to flip a positive nod to an amazing level of response. How… um refreshing! Okay, so I was chipping away tonight at a few more examples notched off for the 50 Web 2.0 Ways to Tell a Story workshop — still about at the 40% mark. For a shift, tonight I took a stab at Toondoo, one of the comic strip creation tools. I had steered clear of these knowing they might be hard to work with (limited space and possibly limited graphics), but I found Toondoo fun to work with- a lot of graphics in their library, an ability to upload your own photos, and rock solid embed code. I spent about 45 minutes doing my first “Doo” and when I went to save, it just [...]

Heart Minnesota posted 3 Aug ’07, 9.27am MDT PST on flickr In light of the bridge collapse in Minneapolis and honoring people affected by this, today I am wearing my Stone Arch Festival t-shirt from our fabulous vacation there in June. Even for me, just one trip over that I35W bridge brings a shudder- I cannot imagine what people feel who perhaps cross that way every day.

Enough already of insanely more, ever expanding facebook apps. Will the web soon implode from some unexpected infinitely recursive facebooking? Here is my new facebook app DogPeeBook – D-friend is for pretty littles kitties. This Big Dog App will drop a hideous, smelly yellow stain on the profile page every person who takes you off their Facebook Friend list. It can only be removed with toxic chemicals. Get yours today.

As a long time baseball fan (Orioles in the 1970s glory years right on through to young Cal in the early 80s…) I’m as much as anyone thinking the Cubs are due their title. But Will, in all your excitement of the standings, get real with how the central division stacks up even in the East, much lest the west. Toss the Cubbies in the Wild West, and they land in 4th place! I’m not boasting the baby Dbacks will not wilt again come September, but those cute little cats might have a lot of work to do with the Western Snakes and friends. ;-)

No, I will not follow this crud on twitter: That is a quick delete. In a few days I predict invites bearing glorious news like: Texas Holdem Galore (txpokerscum) is now following your updates on Twitter.. ViagraPropeciaCialis (thebluepill) is now following your updates on Twitter… NastyAnimalSex (dontclickhere) is now following your updates on Twitter… Hughs Law to be proved any day now….

Just what I needed in the middle of a work day- another interesting web tool. But there is this itch when I find these, and the scratch says, “Hmmm. Must blog this…. must …. blog…. this….” So how do you know if something is “bigger than a breadbox”? You can guess or measure. Sizeasy is billed as atool to help when you are shopping online- like how big is that gizmo when the web catalog has “dimensions: 128x32x87cm”?? This site allows you to enter those exact dimensions, and then either compare it to something else or to an object of known dimensions. it generates it as a 3D view, and you can rotate to compare widths, heights, etc. So, in a quick play, I entered (guesses) for the dimensions of say, a refirgerator, and compared it to a mattress and a plasma screen: But the neat thing is that when [...]

After my excitement of how easy it was to create a rich media piece with Voice Thread, I got this notion of a workshop where participants could not only explore that one tool, but perhaps an array of others I was marginally aware of. So maybe it was after the evening of watching the Paul Simon tribute on PBS, I was humming one of his song, and came of with a concept of “50 Web 2.0 Ways to Tell a Story”– so mangling his lyrics, I propose: The story is all inside your head She said to me The answer is easy if you Go on the web and see I’d like to help you in your struggle To be free There must be fifty web 2.0 ways To tell a story I have been working on this for my October tour of Australia, and what once sounded like a [...]