CogBlogged from ‘November, 2007’

Gardner Campbell gets interviewed by Jon Udell for ITCoversations… I am all gushing like I know a celebrity. Congrats to Dr Glu!

Sometimes a comment spurns me to explore and learn something new– it just happened! I love flickr notes and am confounded about how few people, especially educators take advantage of a tool to provide hypertext annotation to images. But the only way to view them is on the flickr site. So when “kev_hickey_uk” left a comment on my What Can We Do With Flickr demo, I deleved into google to dig up an answer. And I fell into a solution at Yuan.CC Flickr Experiments- Display Flickr With Notes – the details there, and actually easier, the bookmarklet, creates cut and paste JavaScript that allows you to put a note-labeled image into your own site (it likely will not work in public hosted blogs like Blogger, and WordPress.com which filter out javascript code)… but here is my demo…. I Love this web.

I’ve been eager to use CommentPress since I first heard about it. Developed by the Institute for the Future of the Book, CP is a cleverly designed template for WordPress geared for online publication of books and papers. Sections of your paper are posted as blog entries, but the big, big feature is that unlike a blog post where comments are associated with the entire written work (the “post”) CP provides a tools to attach comments to individual paragraphs. Using WordPress for doing “more than cat diaries” has been one of my long standing mantras/tirades, and back when I was at Maricopa, I reconstituted our online publication into a Wp hosted version (sadly, it seems to be offline, sigh). A blog engine is ideal for doing publications. At NMC we have been thinking about ways to build more context around our online conferences, so for next week’s Symposium on the [...]

There are very few things that compel me to use PowerPoint. I have scolded PPT, stomped on it, lifted my doggie leg and peed on it for years… the only reason in the last 12 months I have quietly stifled my contempt is that it is the vehicle where I can post presentations on Slideshare– which I like to call the YouTube of Presentations. When it first came out, it was pretty much a dead ringer for YouTube, though in nice pastel green tones. You upload a Big Fat Media Blob Content (video file of various flavors, hulking powerpoint file), and it converts it to svelte flash format, creating a place on the web to publish your works, and… providing the cut and paste code so you can embed it into other web sites. Since then, Slideshare has added features typical of social networking sites- tags, contacts, messaging, groups, etc. [...]

The word is out and another linktribution for Tim Lauer- Google Maps has replaced the hybrid map view (satellite imagery with roads on top” with a new button- “terrain” which shows topography and landforms in a shaded relief image. But hey, dont go scanning some place like southern Illinois (no offense, but that is some flat land). Take the southern edge of the Colorado Plateau that snakes across Arizona; an escarpment that drops like a table edge 1000 feet or more, the thing we call the “Mogollon Rim” or more familiarly, “The Rim”. Here is the view of it just north of Pine, Arizona- a place we used to camp by exploring the forest roads that snake off of Highway 87: View Larger Map This really shows vividly the shape of this landscape feature, and then you start wondering about the patterns- what are those dendritic, branching arms? What is [...]

Mike Batiste with the Euroleague trophy posted 8 May ’07, 6.58am MDT PST on flickr Euroleague Final’s – Panathinaikos Athens VS Cska Moskow – Athens, Greece 2007 Ditto, ditto, ditto, congrats to all who are finalists in the 2007 Edublog Awards. Vote now, vote early, heck, vote often again and again to see who brings home an “EdBloggie”. Or is it an Eddy? or a Bloggie? Or a Jamesie? And hey, in my blogged opinion, why not let any blogger kiss the trophy who bothers to put their thoughts, ideas out there, day after day (or less frequently), who wades through the mire of comment spam, the wondering of “why bother?”, the rude glares of family members desiring company, yet faithfully yells out into the lonely wilderness, “I have something to say!” Trophies for All!

At the Speed of Link Farm Spam posted 25 Nov ’07, 7.56am MST PST on flickr It took less than 5 hours after a recent blog post for this first link farm spam trackback to arrive. As bad as that is, the give credit to someone else or am I really known as "Kick-Fiend"? Hello Google! Your Page Rank incentive is killing us bloggers! Do Something! And the problem is Google. Sure, “Do No Evil” is a snappy tag line, but in terms of providing the incentive for link spammers that clog us bloggers along every reach of the long tail- Google sits idly by, collecting Adsense $ and does nothing. With all that incredible brain power that can develop cool apps and services, is it possible they cannot throw a few engineers at the problem and put some better logic into search that would punish link spammers? So perhaps [...]

I recently got set up with a wireless broadband card for access to the net via my mobile provider (it is Alltel, but the network is Sprint). While up in the mountains of Strawberry, Arizona, it was time for an old fashioned western shootout between my satellite internet connection (Hughes) and the new mobile card. Despite a lot of connectivity issues the first year with Hughes, I must admit that in the last 12 or 18 months, it was worked very reliably. The satellite modem is connected to an Apple Airport wireless running 802.11(b) speeds, so capable of sending up to 2 MB/s, much more than the theoretical maximum of the dish (1 MB/s). So as the arbitrator, I turned to Speakeasy Speed Test… I love the little speedometer graphics. The Dish was first, and pulled in an impressive 998 kbps download and surprisingly, the upload speed was 568 kbps- [...]

I was pleased to see one of my new, “bestest” colleagues I got to know this year, Sue Waters get a well deserved recognition link from Stephen Downes for her chock full of good advice post on My Advice On Being A More Effective Blogger! (For another gem see her illustrated post on getting more out of Google Reader). As Stephen writes: The advice about reading other blogs and taking part in conversations is spot on. If you think your blog is a ‘publication’ or a form of ‘broadcasting’ then it will not be very successful. I cannot echo this enough, and have long done so, to remind people in all the excitement and frenzy of “publishing” in this user-generated, everyone can create, Read/Write web, the act of participating in other people’s spaces sometimes gets lost. It’s something I mentioned recently as “everyone’s favorite subject” – and the point there [...]

Fresa Tooned posted 24 Nov ’07, 9.28pm MST PST on flickr Messing with those photoshop filters again Maybe this is the secret motto of Facebook? Google? Homeland Security (there is some kind of oxymoron there)? or just a hungry, curious beagle named Fresa… Yes, this blogger is lazy, just slap posting photos from flickr.