CogBlogged from ‘February, 2008’

How does one blog a blogging conference? However you feel like doing it! It’s Friday, time for Moose Camp at Northern Voice 2008 and I am convinced every conference should launch with a tiki bar party. So the Waldorf Hotel was packed with bloggers of all varieties. Got to hang out with Jim Groom, Chris Lott (first time meeting) Jennifer Jones (ditto), Brian Lamb, D’Arcy Norman, Scott Leslie, of which I should link to their blogs but am feeling lazy. It was a great time, am a bit too tired to try and recant the evening… so instead I am trying a new approach (as suggested by Nick Noakes) to attempt Voice Thread blogging the conference. We’ll see how that goes, but be sure to liberally comment. A fun highlight was the open mike where bloggers who had signed up on the wiki shared/read a wide range of blog posts, [...]

Hurry up and submit your session proposals for the Apr 1-3 NMC Symposium on Mashups! This online conference will take place in both Second Life and on the web at LearningTimes. Creative Commons licensed flickr image from lantzilla Data mashups were featured on the mid-term slot for the 2008 NMC Horizon Report. And we now have a brief white paper in CommentPress form so we can generate some discussion leading up to the Symposium. C”mon, I know there are alot of readers out there who are doing cool mashed up stuff! Toss a session idea in the bin at http://www.nmc.org/2008-spring-symposium Proposals are encouraged on the topic in any of the following areas, but this list is not exhaustive and selections are not limited to these categories: * Tools and methods for creating educational mashups * Projects which demonstrate creative use of data mashups * New approaches to data visualizations based [...]

Serious Gulls They Have Here in Vancouver by cogdogblog posted 21 Feb ’08, 12.17am MST PST on flickr Gonna give the gulls something to worry about, I landed today in Vancouver, in an early landing move of Operation Northern Voice. My role is to represent the blogging interests of the Great Unknown Canadian Southern Province of Arizona. Ahh, its great to be back in one of my most favorite cities! Spent a great afternoon visiting with my cousin, walking and talking, and a scrumptious seafood dinner high on the hills of West Vancouver. Words are failing to capture how excited I am and looking forward to this year’s Northern Voice, the best conference on the continent. Strap on your tiki shirts for tomorrow’s opening night party. And protect your Canadian Seagulls from The Dog.

Even with spam fighting plugins, on a daily basis, I am spending time I’d rather be doing sometime constructive, and deleting, moderating, click through the relentless barrage of blog comment spam. I am feeling like the dutch boy and I am getting weary of trying to hold back the dam. The killer was one that came in on an NMC site purporting to be from a “blog” with a url like education DOT blogslog DOT info that the only “education” seemed to be strange studies of less than main line video clips: I really dont think blacklists do much, but if you bother to hope otherise, ban this IP, source of this crap spewing site 74.86.186.66 Over the last three weeks, all of my blogs have been getting spam, from random or at least non repeating (spoofed?) IPs that all look like: <strong>How to Choose the Right Home Builder…</strong> How [...]

Do you want to have fewer blog readers? Are you tired of pesky commenters who disagree with your posts? Is there something to be gained by frustrating users? Here’s how… Just set up your blog so users have to create accounts and log in to post a comment. Heck, they already have 50 gazillion accounts, what is one more? And by the time the poor fools actually wade through a registration form, wait for an email.. they have forgotten what they wanted to criticize you on! And, for an extra added, evil twist.. never email them the password! Brilliant! You will be free of readers in no time. I just had this lovely experience and could not wait to pull out the canine teeth… Okay, so this post on “Henry Jenkins on Emerging Technologies” parrots the list of topics from the 2008 NMC Horizon Report. But the author has a [...]

Yesterday I wrote of the power of using twitter as a “CallOut” to get help or participation or just say, “Hey, we’re hanging out over at this cool web place.” And late last night, another example twittered my way- getting a tweet from both Sue Waters and Al Upton. Al does these fantastic web blogging projects with 3rd grade (or properly Year 3) students at Glenelg School in Adelaid, Australia. For his second year of his miniLegends project (those would be his students, see what they did in 2007), Al is asking for edubloggers to become miniLegend Mentors for this year’s students more or less picking a young blogger and agreeing to reglular comment on their blog. If you’re an educational blogger of any kind (or visitor) and would like to ‘mentor a mini’ then please leave a comment on THIS page saying who you would like to be connected [...]

My oft repeated line this year is something about most enjoying the net based things that happen totally without provocation, plan, just spontaneous connectedness. I am sure that its maybe 3% of the general population that can really experience this with wide eyed excited wonder, and I am fortunate to know some of the best among that percentage. I was setting down to shoot down some emals, perhaps edit those audios I need to publish soon, like yesterday, and as the habit goes, I said, “I’ll just check twitter quickly, just a minute to scroll.” And there, in the 5 seconds ago, I saw Jen was linking to a ustream.tv channel she was broadcasting on. I’d not done hardly any ustreaming since my trip to Australia, and said, hey, I wonder how it works if you have multiple people broadcasting? So I flipped on my channel and we could pretty [...]

Let me join the Jim Groom Kum-Ba-Ya I Love WordPress Chorus. In this least year, I’ve rolled out 3 NMC web sites that are published via WordPress, with each one going deeper into the bowels of the templates and just more jazzed how I can bend them to my will, casting CSS, PHP, plugins, MySQL to do my bidding. This is unlike drupal, where after a year I am still trying to figure out just how the heck it works and manages information. Its still a grey murky, opaque blue gumdrop box. I am trying to summon the drupal love, and it aint happening. But WordPress, you make me sing. In this blog post that portends to be a monster one of length, I am going to dissect a new site I worked in gory technical detail. On each of these sites, I have started with a standard template and [...]

Be happy…! posted 18 May ’06, 7.59am MDT PST on flickr …because life is now! Don’t wait for things like this to destroy your happiness. A storytelling moment for the kids at Hummingbird together with kids from our community base, performed by our theatrical director, Valdilene. I would say many of my blog posts are rants and complaints, so its only in the sense of balance to once in a while take the blue pill, and write about something “nice.” So I thinking of my trip next week across the border (Canadian, eh) for the Northern Voice conference and other Vancouver destinations. But I remember my mobile phone plan is “national”- it stops at the border. I knew my carrier, Alltel, had a North American plan that did reach Van Rock City, though it was at least another $20 a month. So I just called to find out what was [...]

Web Storytelling in Interesting Snippets posted 12 Feb ’08, 10.36pm MST PST on flickr Lynette Webbs’ Interesting Snippets Flickr Set came to me via UPS delivery, in print form, ordered from LuLu. This is the first on demand print product I bought, and am impressed with it from concept to product. This set of slides is impressive to me for many reason, as powerful examples of communication via words and pictures equally, of using creative commons licensed images, but also just of simple, pure creativity. See the original flickr photo at www.flickr.com/photos/lynetter/761222536/ How neat was it to rip open a UPS shipping box and find a lovely color print booklet that was generated at some point from a set of images in flickr! Go ahead and poke fun at my expense for getting excited over analog media. I am enjoying the feel of paper. And I have to come back [...]