CogBlogged from ‘September, 2007’

What a Deal for my DeadPod posted 30 Sep ’07, 11.06am MDT PST on flickr I liked the concept of BuyMyBrokeniPod: We offer a fast, simple, and eco-friendly way for you to get money for used, new or broken iPods and iPhones. We accept Classic, Touch, Video, Photo, Nano, Mini, iPhones & Generation 4 to 1 iPods. We don’t care if your iPod has a cracked screen, the a busted hard drive busted, or shows a sad face, has buttons that don’t work, is acting weird, is old and creepy, has water damage, or if the battery is dead. We will pay you top dollar for your unwanted iPod MP3 Player or iPhone guaranteed! Keep your old iPod out of the landfill and you get cash in return! What do they do with them? Who knows? Just for fun, I filled out the form for my 1st Generation Shuffle, admittedly [...]

Link spammers never sleep. They are hard at work breaking around the edges of our futile efforts to keep ‘em at bay. And now they are getting harder to sniff out at first glance in the moderation queue, as they clothe their efforts in false fronts, which, if like an old wester ghost town, when you peek around the corner there is nothing there. Link farms are sites aimed at one miserable purpose- boosting Google Rank. What they do is create tons of inward nested links, a few outward ones towards their client sites (the ones they are trying to boost) and try to get links to their sites by spamming blogs with comments that backlink to the farm. If you ever follow the links back to the farm, the daily posts are not posts at all, just a list of snippets copied from other blogs. So one tries to [...]

Three Amigos Kerpoofing It posted 29 Sep ’07, 12.51pm MDT PST on flickr Working on our "teaser" for the K12 Online conference… Played a little with this fun tool for creating cartoon graphics, www.kerpoof.com – harder to figure out how to embed or create linked stories. Last Flickr blog post (for now). Must run out to Home Depot to do some Real Work.

Picnik Let’s Us Really Play With Photos posted 25 Sep ’07, 9.18pm MDT PST on flickr Fresa and Kasha are rather excited about the new features in picnik, the free online photo editor that lets you modify images from flickr, facebook, photobucket, your desktop, and then save back to these sites. The new tools allow text and shape overlays, new color effects, and more. Some of these are tools that are going to be part of their premium package (US$24.95 per year), but this week, for the launch, they are all free. So if it were me, I’d play a lot this week with picnik, more fun and creative than chasing cats, One of the Small Precious Web Gems I plan to tout for my workshops is picnik, a web app for editing and adding effects to photos. I had a small chance to participate in the beta that led [...]

ICanHasAirlineTickets posted 29 Sep ’07, 2.38pm MDT PST on flickr If you have not caught the I CAN HAS CHEEZBURGER craze, you are about 1 meme behind. It is a subset of the broader genre of LOL CATS. I created my oen with the ICanHazCheezBurger Factory, a site where you can browse a vast set of uploaded cat images, and then annotate them, to create your own. Mine has its own URL. It helped me since I have a severe deficit of cat photos. Yes, like many things on the net it is surficially, well silly. Maybe stupid. And easy for people to snub noses at. But dig past the content, and what yuo have is (a) a user generated collection of media about a topic; (b) a web 2.0 tool for remixing the images with text to create new content; (c) a network of tools for voting, sharing, etc. [...]

I CN HZ TWEETS posted 29 Sep ’07, 2.06pm MDT PST on flickr Twitter is cheezing my tweets again. Am ready to coin the term "Cheez Tweetos" – sort of eCheese Its lacking the orange crud on your fingers (though blue bird feathers works fine for debris) Copy your tweets to your clipboard before “updating” – you have been warned

I’ve barely had time to breathe much less update all of my WordPress powered sites, but noticed today one small feature I’ve been waiting for… I was actually, for no logical reason, setting up one more new WP powered web site for NMC, not quite ready for prime time. But what is cool is the plugins page now informs you when a plugin has a newer version available: Until now you would have to check each plug-in home page to check. Nice. Other goodies lurk under the hood- tags for posts built in — and it looks like it will import tags from old plugins (like Bunny’s technorati tags I have used a bit) and some other enhancements for dealing with blog post URLs. For CogDogBlog, the changeover is easy, as the Dreamhost one click upgrades make it a no brainer; my corral of NMC blogs will take the old [...]

01 roach flick treatment posted 29 Sep ’05, 4.19am MDT PST on flickr A nightmare. Reoccuring. I was cleaning off my Edirol of old files and forget I had recorded this phone spam. I get recurring automated message calls on my do not call listed work number- they leave no number, so its hard to report. So when I was there to get the spam, I aimed to try and let them know they were breaking the law. The first time, I kept pressing the number supposedly to get them to stop. Yeah, like that worked: http://cogdogblog.com/wp-content/audio/phome-spam.mp3 The second time, I pressed the “1″ to talk to an operator. When the person came on, I asked if they knew they were calling a listed number in the Do Not Call registry. The person kept reading from a recorded sales pitch. I asked them to take me off the list. The [...]

I’m still scratching my head to find out exactly why I think this is interesting… I just have that tingly feeling. But as we see ever increasing of interest in virtual worlds, continued explosion of web things, mashups, and mobile technologies, its the connections of them that seem to intrigue me the most. Although I lack a phone even capable of tis stuff, the things that allow people to connect by mobile devices, share, acquire thing in our every day meanders, or via coordinated efforts seem to be underplayed in education (with notable efforts), especially considering the proliferation of mobile phones in many pockets. There are many examples of the kind of creative group activities facilitated by phones +/- web +/- geo-location data like you see at the Come Out & Play Festivals. They are simple and elegant in design, and do not call for massive amounts of technology. And [...]

Even after all these years, and all the spam and phlaff that arrives in my inbox, when i am reading mail form colleagues, I do take note of what is hanging in their sig (signature). In some sense, you might argue it is a very low tech ‘avatar’, it is some array of text we choose to represent our selves – contact info, symbols (anyone remember ascii art?), quotations, etc. So today I spotted in a colleagues message, the first quote I have seen attributed to a tweet (something twittered, c’mon get with it… Woah, the noun tweet is yet to grace WikiPedia!). Okay, here is the gem: “I start things, but I never” — D. Stahl (Twitter) I don’t know who “D.” is but he/she is clever. Quote that.