CogBlogged from ‘December, 2007’

Ahhh, that electronic tome of academia, the The Chronicle of Higher Education, is sporting some of the Emperor’s clothing line. In an article published December 17, 2007 on Colleges Are Reluctant to Adopt New Publication Venues the keen writers there “discovered” the NMC 2007 Horizon Report: Academe has been slow to accept new forms of scholarship like blogs, wikis, and video clips, according to a report released last week that examines emerging technology trends in higher education. The Horizon Report 2007 predicts that in four to five years, academe will accept as scholarship this kind of interactive online material and will develop methods for evaluating it. emphasis added since the 2007 Horizon Repot was released in January 2007 at the EDUCAUSE/ELI conference- heck I blogged about it. Surely, they have access to sophisticated research tools (e.g. Google) that would readily reveal the date of publication of the topic of their [...]

This falls into the category of “curiosities raised from idle web wandering”. I just noticed after not looking at it for a while at how much stuff (or crud or crap) I have running down the sidebar of this blog. Its stuff I pretty much ignore, as likely do others. I do get some self enjoyment out of my Clustrmap, which accumulates stats on visitors and where in the world they come form (or where in the world is their IP number assigned). As a cheapskate, I have the free version, loaded with Google Ads. Those are alos things I can look at and totally ignore. Any AdSense micro-payments I may have clicked/contributed were likely accidental faux clicks. But I’m looking at the ads on my clustr map, and wondering how they are selected? On a normal web site, I gather there is some top secret algorithm that analyzes the [...]

Moose Mugshot posted 30 May ’07, 4.18pm MDT PST on flickr We just spent a week camping up at Algonquin. It was wonderful, such a gorgeous wilderness and what wildlife! Woo hoo! I’m already planning to attend Northern Voice 2008 but now I am packing the good moose duds since my session on “50 Web 2.0 Ways to Tell a Story” got selected for the Saturday schedule… this will be similar to, but in no way, a clone of the previous versions. Looking forward to representing the Greatly Unknown Canadian Southern Province of Arizona. I was sorely tempted to use another photo but that one might be a bit offensive ;-)

It boggles a bit, but Feed2JS (Feed to Javascript) was an “experiment” I started 4 1/2 years ago when I first fell into the wondrous potential of RSS for dynamic distribution of content. It continues to run as a largely un-attended services (meaning I’ve hardly paid attention to the source code for 2 years) thanks to the generous hosting donated by Modevia Web Services. The site gets used quite a bit, last stats reported over 8100 feeds cached in a 24 hour period (the cache is emptied every 24 hours) and a bit of googling on the embedded code suggests it might be use on more than 16,000 web sites. It has a firm spot on the edna site in Australia. For some time, the code has been sitting rather desperately alone on eduforge, so this is my attempt to drum up some interest among RSS junkies and PHP smarties [...]

Last week I was at an NMC Board meeting, hosted at a very special location in Cupertino, and was oh, so overwrought with jealousy as colleagues pawed, swashed, swooshed with their shiny new iPhones. And I would be among the cool kids– if were it not for the utterly ridiculous lock AT&T has on being a sole provider of connectivity. Whatever happened to the old American spirit of competition? Free markets? I cannot answer the economic theory questions, but my NoiPhone status remains as the sole provider for connectivity has almost no signal in the part of the state I spend a lot of time, and likely a lot more in the future. As such, the iPhone would be all ‘i” and no “phone” (and no “net” unless I was near wifi). My rant is all about me. Or Them. AT&T plasters these full color page ads in our Sunday [...]

Spock Bag posted 14 Oct ’05, 1.30pm MDT PST on flickr I embroidered this Spock bag for Mason the other day. I am trying to determine of the recent small trickle of emails notifying me that “XXXXX has requested your trust on Spock” is of merit or just another blotch of Quechup. So before I beam up or do any sort of social software mind meld, what do I make of something billed as: Spock is the leading people search application. Spock searches the internet to help you find information about people in your life. When you join, you can build your network to find where everyone you know is on the internet. Every time you search, Spock will personalize your results to include information that is relevant to your network. You can enhance your search experience even further by establishing a trust relationship with people in your network, allowing [...]

Just came across TryPhone a site that offers web based interactive interfaces for a wide range of mobile phones. Seems a great way to see the features. And in the spirit of good embed-ness, you can put any of this in a web page. So before I do this, my own backl story. I have always been years behind in the latest phone tech. I use mine mainly for… calls, plus some photo/upload to flickr and a few posts to twitter. I am definitely a phone lagger. But believe me, after trying an iphone in the Apple Store last August in Chicago, the tempation has been hard to ignore. You want one, admit it. I want one, I admit it. So with some shame I mus admit that when offered to get a work paid iphone… I actually turned it down (for now). Why? Well, my previous one just died, [...]

Medaling is Just Finishing posted 9 Dec ’07, 12.05pm MST PST on flickr Award for completing the 2007 Fiesta Bowl Half Marathon, in Scottsdale (2:21 slow going!) — this is just the half way in prep for my first Marathon a month from now. I’ve casually watched, and greatly impressed, by the ways people are using web technology to raise money for causes- Beth Kanter has not only documented this to a tee but done some tremendous world building good in her efforts to help send Cambodian students to college. Stuff that matters. So I will give it a try, but certainly with not all the clever chip-in campaigns and Facebook/Twitter strategizing that Beth perfected– I’ll just resort to old fashioned begging for contributions. As my own personal challenge, because I have always hated running, 2 years ago I took on running my first half marathon- and to prep for [...]

How is that for timing? The day after last rant about the way Facebook sends messages by email (“You have a message! I know it! You Don’t! But I wont tell you unless you visit me and get sucked into my vortex! hahahaha” might that be McLuhan on the side, “the message is not the message”??), apparently they changed their ways, and now include the message in the email. Hallelujah? Hardly. Since I turned all notifications off, my inbox has been mostly clean of FaceGunk. Mostly. I am still getting notifications of these “X-me” items, although I dont have the application installed, and thus I cannot dictate its messaging. This use of email to me just reeks of the worthlessness of the message. “Click here to see the message’!!!! Click here, Facebook, I got a message for ya. Now this perhaps angry, growling post is mostly in jest, and while [...]

web shows what we have chosen to care about posted 9 Dec ’07, 2.26pm MST PST on flickr I’ve always been fascinated by efforts to map cyberspace… most maps seem to focus on the physical network connections but the ones I find the most interesting are those that try to map the diversity and connections between content. This quote nicely articulates why. Here is the quote in full: “If you were to make a map of the Web, showing all the sites and all the links, you would be making a map of things the 500 million people on the Web find interesting. That’s a lot different than a map of the real world that shows where the mountains are and where the oceans end and land begins. The real world map shows what we humans have been given to work with. The Web shows what we have chosen to [...]