CogBlogged from ‘December, 2007’

Wish I had the productivity of Dave Sifry; in his announcement, in 48 hours he rolled out a nifty new twitter/blog crawl mashup called Hoosgot (aka “Who’s Got?”): a simple way to ask who’s got what you’re looking for. Just put “hoosgot” in a blog post or a Twitter tweet and it’ll show up here in Hoosgot. It’s meant to give you a place to send the requests for all of those things that you’ve wanted, but just can’t find – chances are, what you want already exists and someone else out there in the ether knows about it. If someone’s got what you’re looking for, or a clue in that direction, they post a comment. RSS feeds flow from the comments… We humbly trace our roots to the wonderful lazyweb which, unfortunately shut down in 2006. It was a glorious experiment in what the web could produce – co-creation [...]

Something that always gets my fur up is the blatant use of fishy language dressed up like “fact” or science. Last week when i was so idly bored (by choice) I was watching late night TV, and there were two different ads for things like “Gut Buster” or “Pilates Plus” – those ones where people are so obviously and disgustedly 6-pack abs fit they dont need devices to get in shape- flash by these charts that claim, “227% More Efficiency” or “190% more effective”… and than never say what they are compared to or how. But that’s TV, it is aimed at the PT Barnum crowd. Yet, I find the same crud in my inbox. I usually ignore the requests for “LinkedIn” connections or Plaxo requests until I get to a night I am so bored (beyond the boredom of watching network TV, really rock bottom boredom), and I then [...]

It took twitter quite some time to add a search bar so you can find fellow tweeters, so its no surprise that TwitDir arose as an outside tool serving as a Twitter Directory, claiming to allow you to search among 715,235 twitterers. And since this the season of contagious listmaking, TwitDir offers the answers to the idle curiosity question of who are the top 100 people followed, the top 100 updaters, etc. The top people followed are not all that surprising… maybe. At the top of the heap, with 6934 followers, is Twitterific, makers of the uber twitter app for MacOS. There is some sort of Mac/PC irony waiting there, buy I skip. In second, at zero surprise level is Scoble, pulling off the mazing dual marks of having 6887 followers (that’s a lot of breathing down the neck, eh) and Scoble follows 6054 others. He must get the friends [...]

Tweetscan is “a real-time search engine for Twitter posts. Beyond that, TweetScan can do your searches automatically and email them to you”. At the ego level, you can use it to search for tweets directed at yourself or make that, myself. So this is extremely useful to track replies people may make to you who are from people you dont follow directly (oh my gosh, I just admitted I dont return the follow favor…. alot). And even more, you can get an RSS feed for this, so you can track ongoing. But you could also use it to track key words or trends across twitter space. Heck, this site created something twitter itself ought to do. But crap, they still cannot list your followers in alpha order. WTF is with that? I dont know what twitter is programmed in (smells like Ruby), but how freaking hard is it to toss [...]

The blog readability site has plenty of bounces around the blog-o-sphere – plug in a blog URL, and the magical black box somehow comes up with an absolute determination. I am proud to wear by junior high school reading level badge, which means I am certainly writing for an audience that is at a higher maturity level than the author: What is abhorrent is the copy and paste code to put the badge/graphic in your site comes equipped with a link to a site that has no relevance. I removed it from mine, but any marginal credibility this site may have had is tossed into the rubbish bin by tacking on a link to a cash advance web site. I mean WTF is with that? If you copy and paste and code and put into your blog, take a gander at what you are pasting Yeah, my blog may read [...]

Get it?

Blank Page posted 12 Feb ’07, 12.18pm MST PST on flickr Mmm … what shall I create today? It’s probably not healthy that I awoke this morning, still shaking off the dream state, thinking I was writing a blog entry. Why dream about writing blog posts? Why not red sports cars, standing on mountains, that girl from the Herb Albert album cover… So it is this time of year one one tends to look back in rose colored glory on the past 364 days, making “best of” lists (ohh, my “best” blog posts…. I could not really dredge one up, blecchh), or turning those glasses forward and fountaining predictions for the next set. “2008 will be the year of _______”. Nah. Well, maybe a little reflection. A year ago, I had heard of this thing called “twitter” but had bookmarked it into oblivion. In that time (it was in January [...]

Even with a slew of slaughtered email spam and just about every message I have gotten for several years, my use of GMail’s space hovers around 0%: Some of this is likely because they quietly just upped everyone’s quote to 6 Megabytes, a whole lotta space indeed. The again Google is out there harvesting all of my precious email for their own profit. Heck, if they can make a profit off of my Nigeria inheritance spam and my facebook-twitter-every-other-social-web site bacn, go fer it. Speaking of spammers, thankfully they continue to send messages in all caps, subject line too. Makes it dead easy to zap ‘em, if if there was any question whether some unknown person gave me $6 million or if I won the Dutch Lottery. Again.

Yes another log on the fire for my adoration of flickr. One of my “dogs only” rss feed in my Reader is a watch on my comments in flickr (there is an RSS feed for yourself at http://www.flickr.com/recent_activity.gne?days=2). There is asome bit of ego involved, but mainly so I can reply to comments, yes that is the reason. Anyhow, I saw this one just now, and it did not seem to make a whole lot of sense:\\ But when I went to the photo to see it, I could not find it. And the link took me to some site that had no relevance at all to the photo or comments already posted. So then, just out of curiosity, I followed the link on the commenter where I see: so it seems that flickr is staying on top of this and stomping accounts created for spamming. They did it before [...]

Morning With 8th Graders posted 21 Dec ’07, 11.56am MST PST on flickr I got an invite yesterday to join in on a WorldBridges session with 8th grade students of Lee Baber (Western part of Virginia), Paul Allison (New York City), and Madeline ? (also new York) in completely chaotic, open discussion about "the future of school" Jeff Lebow coordinate the magic on WorldBridges between a live uStream from Lee’s class, from me at my home office in Arizona, and on Skype audio with the others. It sure is not the 8th grade I experienced, and I am glad to see how much has changed. These are some motivated kids. I’m not sure I did much here beyond tossing out some questions– 8th grade student energy, if harnessed, could likely lessen our dependence forever on fossil fuel ;-) What I learned by listening: * Teachers make the difference to these [...]