CogBlogged from ‘November, 2007’

Which Web Might This Be? posted 24 Nov ’07, 9.28pm MST PST on flickr I really thought the weaver was Sir Tim Berners-Lee… This book in the Pine, Arizona Senior Center Thrift Store (one of the finest anywhere) caught me eye. Actually I think it was about Chinese herbal medicine, but a little cropping, and I get a curious web headline. So is this web with no weaver of any use?

Morning Bacn posted 23 Nov ’07, 6.30am MST PST on flickr Thanks Facebook, for the hefty morning meal of bacn. All these extra calories after Thanksgiving are making me want to auuughhhhhtttthhhhpffffhhhhhhh.

I’m somebody now! Millions of people look at this web site everyday! This is the kind of spontaneous publicity – your name in a wiki – that makes people. I’m in Wikipedia! Things are going to start happening to me now. apologies to Steve Martin… Don’t ask why, well I was bored, and looked for myself in Wikipedia and found me – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Levine. The major league baseball career has gone well, though my pitching arm seems to be sore. My biography is now complete

Google Search Error- Who Me? Spyware? posted 20 Nov ’07, 11.16am MST PST on flickr A new response on a Google search. It seems the 3 words I submitted are associated with spyware? If they had included some http client detection, they might have surmised my operating system makes this extremely unlikely. Want to play? I was trying to find the URL for that paradoy blog for the guy who runs Apple. You know… "fake ______ _____-" And I thought they really might be finally apologizing that their empire is built upon creating incentives for blog spammers. Darn. I dont know about you, but in the last weeks I get a regular stream of trackback spam to spam link farms- places that just quote fragments of your blog posts in some hopes of increasing PageRank. They may not “do evil” but they do provide the carrots to blog spammers.

Since in my Being There presentation I blabbed about being “open” and looking at new tools from the “inside” I am trying my best to hold those attitudes while looking at what is becoming the juggernaut of Facebook. I’m feeling a bit slow to warm to it and looking for some heat. Facebook just seems a bit stingy with content. I get the insanely interconnectedness of it all, of getting updates not only what people are “doing” (wow, it is like twitter in N-dimensions). The adding of new tools and customizing etc is bone head easy. People are creating new add on tools every day, so the platform being “open” to creating new functionality. That’s good. I see organizations (e.g. my own) stepping in to provide a presence and gaining new connections. Well, at least “friends”, and yet, that is in quotes. There are true friends and there are one [...]

This story is old news if you followed my trail last month through Australia. Being up in our cabin again in Strawberry, Arizona, and seeing flowers till blooming in mid November (global warming is hot here) got me thinking again about the most amazing example of web serendipity that happened in Tasmania. Its one of those thing that just reinforces how big and small, flat and bumpy, the world truly is. In my “Being There” presentation I spend a bit of it on trying to remind people how big the internet is. It sounds like an obvious statement– we all know it, right– but it is very similar to Geologic time- we can talk about things being “hundreds of millions of years old” or created “billions of years ago”, but on the human time scale, those spans of time are almost incomprehensible. The same is true (I believe) for the [...]

Thanks to Marlene from Adelaide for locating what may be the ancestral grounds of CogDogBlog- a place called Cobdogla. With a population of 273 Cobdoglians, this place is described: The tongue-twistingly named Cobdogla (an Aboriginal word meaning “land of plenty”) has a fascinating history. Much of the land hereabouts – from west of Overland Corner right through into New South Wales – was taken up under a pastoral lease in 1846 by John Chambers, who raised purebred horses for the police and military. The Cobdogla Irrigation and Steam Museum houses the impressive Humphrey pump, the only working model of its kind in the world. It’s gas-driven and fed by water from Joiner’s Lagoon near the site of the original Cobdogla Station Homestead. You can also take a ride on Margaret the Steam Train. If you are curious as to the location, here’s yer Google Map: View Larger Map I regret [...]

Ugh, will this one ever end? I decided to create an audio narrated slidecast of my 50 Web 2.0 Ways to Tell a Story, using the audio I recorded when I did the presentation at the 2007 NMC Regional Conference at Tulane. It took a bit more time, as I had to grab screenshots, stuff them into a PowerPoint, add the links, upload to slideshare, and THEN do the synchronization. There are a few places I missed the screens so I am talking about some things you cannot see, but worse! What a major “umm” fest this was! Ca I plead fatigue? I think it might be “49,000 Ummm Web 2.o Ways…” But here it is for your viewing torture. Man, do I like Slideshare! | View | Upload your own Okay, if you use my materials (and I hope you do)- please go to http://cogdogroo.wikispaces.com/50+Ways but please, please, do [...]

I use tihs line in several presentations. “Whenever some technology ‘expert’ (hey like me) gets up here and tells you that a technology will ‘save you time’ that should raise your red flags. This is a codeword for ‘I am lying and blowing smoke’”. It is a Big Lie. The Technology itself will not save you any time. It will just sit there. It will consume your time as you get to learn it, and climb some slope of usability that may eventually get you to a point of being efficient. And this whole concept of “saving time” is often whipped up into those (again a lie) headlines about “Technology _________ is Costing Business 5.6 Billion Dollars a Year on Productivity”. If you dig at any depth, you will find some grossly simple and overstate math- if you make an assumpyion people spend X amount of hours at work (twittering [...]

With a month’s training lost to illness and travel, I am finally back into the groove prepping to run the January 13 PF Chang’s Marathon (see how much I love running). This means I need heavy distractions, like music, as well as the occasional podcast. I am not subscribed to anything in particular, and mostly cherry pick things from ITConversations. I almost fell over in joy and laughter today listening to Guy Kawasaki on The Art of Innovation: He presents a number of examples for each of the steps, using both his own experience at Apple as well as by presenting innovative products and how they were developed. His common sense thoughts are both entertaining and useful. The irony was he starts out by telling the audience how “most CEO keynote’s really suck” how they go on forever- his approach is always to do a “Top 10″ format, so you [...]