CogBlogged from ‘May, 2008’

I’m just back from a 3 day visit to St Paul for the Midwest Library Technology Conference hosted at Macalester College. This was the first time for this conference, and with attendance well over 250 and from the level of activity I observed, planner Ron Joslin and colleagues should be very pleased. I liked very much how they tried a variety of session formats other than 50 minute lectures (like in the Games in Libraries session we actually got to play some of the games; I might be hooked on Wii bowling after a few rounds). I should add another noticeable feature of note at the conference was the overt effort to be green sensitive with the amount of paper generated- the program was a singl trifold, double side printed with agenda on one side and map on the other. They asked us to turn in name badges every day [...]

Follow Kokopelli to Starbucks! by cogdogblog posted 27 May ’08, 4.58pm MDT PST on flickr Mesmerized by the sounds of his flute, you order a triple latte venti… again. The World’s Largest Kokopelli pipes his way in Camp Verde, Arizona www.worldslargestthings.com/arizona/kokopelli.htm This one’s for you, my coffee monopoly hating friend. FYI, I marched over to the convenience store and got a juice and water, no venti shmenti for me.

You Are Mere Plankton for a Whale of a Twitter by cogdogblog posted 27 May ’08, 4.05pm MDT PST on flickr So twitter is still borked, but they have spent time changing the graphics that lets you know they are borked. And worse, my fellow plankton — it is now our fault: "Too many tweets!" how sweet, how sickening sweet….

It registers a Spock-like eyebrow raise when the folks at Mashable.com are wowed by a new tool, so check out Tag Galaxy. This is a visually engaging tool to explore flickr photos by tags. That alone does not say much, but what this site does is create a planetary like display for showing how tags are related, and the interface invites you to fly in deeper and deeper. So in a Tag Galaxy not very long ago (yesterday) and not far away… You start by entering a tag as the beginning of your journey, and immediately you feel some sort of Force: In the center of my planetary flickr system is Arizona, with circling planetoids (size proportional to number of photos in flickr) are ones to explore -Grand Canyon, Tucson, Saguaro, Desert, Sunset, each revolving around the start point (I am not sure of the distance from the center has [...]

A few weeks ago I came across a nifty new web embedded quiz tool on Steve Dembo’s site – his edublogger quiz was rather thorough, and is worth seeing how well you know your fellow bloggers. Steve made this quiz with MyStudiyo which who knows, may become the YouTube for multiple choice quizzes? It offers you templates and easy tools to build a quiz, and your questions and feedbacks can include images and video media. I think there is also a feature where people can contribute more questions to your quiz (not that I ever had a test where I did not get enough questions!) which may have some interesting applications- a quiziki? They are running a contest this month where if you create a quiz and embed it in your blog, you could win a top prize of one of those sexy little ASUS EEE computers as top prize [...]

Nings are everywhere. I’m not necessarily writing here about the virtue (or not) of the build your own social network tool. I’m in a few Nings, and technically/design-wise they have come along way from some of the first ones I recall 3 or 4 years ago when they first came out. No, these is a mere observation, based upon an article. No, not the written kind, the grammatical kind. If you listen closely to the language of people who use these sites, especially from some students, you hear:

The psychic should know… by designwallah posted 14 Apr ’08, 10.41pm MDT PST on flickr Let’s see if we are on the same page with this fun image….

Twitter has had a recent nasty string of outages, technical gaffs. Ouch, poor little blue birdie. While I have taken my cheap shots at them, I am liking pondering why, in the fickle fast pace high expectations web 2.0 days we live in (and knowing the “we” there is perhaps not all that inclusive of the world at large), that people are staying with it? The latest one on Saturday, was summarized on the twitter-blog (love how running a Google blog they are putting their tech efforts into their code): Around 11 am in San Francisco, our main database db006, crashed because of too many connections. We have to put the service into an unscheduled maintenance mode to recover. Folks will see degraded service for the next few hours. What jumped out at me was the fact that poor db006 (obviously not the database that is shaken, not stirred) is [...]

Google’s genesis was in well executed back-end server stuff (those precious search algorithms, they KO-d Altravista, Yahoo, Lycos) and at the time of ad-cluttered busy sites, it’s stark simplicity design of plain text, one colorful logo, on a white background was the antidote to the web status quo. But hey, its 2008, and there is no reason not to personalize your iGoogle home page experience with a little more color with the user generated iGoogle Artist Themes Now you can put the work of world-class artists and innovators on your personalized Google homepage. Below is what I use on one of my four browsers, 3 of which have a different iGoogle account (dont ask why) and I have a desert theme on my main one in Firefox. As a subtle nicety on these landscapish looking banners, the scenery changes with the time of day (my time of day, not theirs), [...]

TentCam Originally uploaded by cogdogblog Back in the day when I was a free wheeling no responsibility grad student herein Arizona, I spent a lot of time doing solo backpack trips, especially out in the Superstition Wilderness Area and up on the Mogollon Rim. It sure seemed time to get back to nature, and my equipment needed an upgrade, so I made got some new gear last week from REI (well actually it came Friday, the day before my planned trip). I had picked a spot I had seen a few years ago- its quite a ways back on the Rim Road, Forest Road 300 which follows closely the General Cook Trail ruote east/west along the edge of the Mogollon Rim, a 1000 foot escarpment that marks the southern edge of the Colorado Plateau. So it was a 25 mile forest road drive, maybe pushing the limits of my little [...]