CogBlogged from ‘June, 2008’

Flickr Wordle by cogdogblog posted 29 Jun ’08, 9.26pm MDT PST on flickr Everybody and their mother blogger has noted Wordle, the lovely tag generator. I thigk I was one of the first to note it, but hey, who gives a flying fart about being web first except blog-o–ego-maniacs. Okay I was just google chatting with chilly Sue Waters and she share with me this site: www.fluffykittens.com/wordle/ which beyond the weird feline URL, offers an interface that creates a tag list for a given flickr account, which, as text, can be put into Wordle, so the above image represents my tagging activity in flickr..

I only like email spam when it is creatively subtle in cleverness– this one comes close. In this sneaky approach, the email references victims of Nigerian spammers with a supposed offer to submit for reimbursement courtesy of the government of Nigeria and the United Nations. So if you were really moronic enough to fall for an email scam once, this one can zap you a second time? Oh my, if you read it on face value, it even sounds legitimate .. well, except for them offering to feed me more modalities. And they got that hoodlum! Oh and sure, government officials would certainly be contacting you via a Gmail account. Yup. From: ” Barrister Jerry Williams” <compensationoff@gmail.com> Date: June 29, 2008 4:23:43 AM GMT-07:00 To: undisclosed-recipients:; Subject: EFCC And United Nations Compensation Committee Reply-To: <efcc.un@gmail.com> Attention: Beneficiary, SCAMMED VICTIMs/ $1.5 million COMPENSATION-REF/PAYMENTS CODE: 01589. We were delegated by Economic and [...]

Here’s another interesting tool for visualizing relationships in twitter, Jeff Clark’s TwitArcs: I’ve combined some visuals from a side project related to linguistics with twitter data to create TwitArcs. It takes the latest 100 tweets for a twitter ID or term of interest and creates a list representation that has arcs connecting messages sent to the same users or that use the same primary term. You can click on the left side to load the tweets for a new user, on the right side to load the tweets for a specific term, and in the middle to visit the actual tweet. Sure enough red arcs on length show people I “converse” with meaning the people who I tweet at or who tweet back my way, and blue arcs on right connect conversations by common words. You explore these arcs by moving the mouse down the page to hover over your [...]

Real Time Satellite and Space Shuttle Tracking by cogdogblog posted 27 Jun ’08, 4.45pm MDT PST on flickr Nifty site for getting info about satellites and tracking them in real time on a google map. This shows locations of GPS satellites and my home location. www.n2yo.com/

It is an understatement, but I was extremely ecstatic when I got an email in January from Jeff Utecht asking me if I’d be interested in speaking at the Learning 2.008 Conference in Shanghai. Must details got fuzzy as I thought about going to China. So I paused an appropriate amount of milliseconds before replying with my “hell yes” message. Last year was the first iteration of the conference, and I remember reading bits of the blog coverage, and liking the different ideas they had packed into that first version. I was just listening to Jeff’s podcast with Ken Carroll: Learning 2.008 Podcast and am liking even more they ways they are trying to make this a different kind of format, with mixes of un-conference activities, hands on experiences, some Second Life-age, no paper, every session recorded/podcasted, and lots of social interaction. Oh, and they are asking the 8 presenters [...]

I love the cleverness of Ken Rodoff’s description of the teacher you don’t want to be in “an unexamined summer“. I’d say more, but don’t want to give it away. linkribution across the seas to Graham Wegner

After waiting for a replacement camera battery and a new 8 Gb memory card, I was eager to try out a first Gigapan image. I was introduced to this nifty technology by Keene Haywood at University of Texas, Austin; since Keene knows the developer of the robotic camera control developed by CharmedLabs, he got me one of the last available beta versions of the device. As background, Gigapan is part of the Global Connection Project at Carnegie Mellon University: The Gigapan camera is a simple robotic platform for capturing very high-resolution (gigapixel and up) panoramic images from a standard digital camera. Sponsored by Google, CMU and the NASA Ames Intelligent Robotics Group, the Global Connection Project has also developed software which places you inside the panorama and lets you explore. An earlier version of this imaging technology was developed for the Mars Exploration Rovers; the panoramas created from Mars enabled [...]

Captain Westley by cogdogblog posted 30 Oct ’07, 10.50am MDT PST on flickr Westley organized a great way to end my trip with this rowing expedition in the Sydney Harbour I’m headed down to the Phoenix airport to pick up my friend/colleague Westley Field who I got to know last October during the Australia tour. Westley lives in Sydney and on my last day there, he took me on a special tour of the harbor. He makes a yearly pilgrimage to the US to visit schools and educators, and asked to pay a visit with me in Strawberry, AZ (way off the beaten track?). He’s on his way to NECC after this, where he will be talking about Skoolaborate and other cool stuff…. and I’ll see him again July 10 in Melbourne as my NMC colleagues and I go there to launch the Horizon.au project. We have no harbor or [...]

In the vein of last February’s WordPress Dissection where I detailed the ripping apart and patching together of a WP template, here’s another bit if funny business I recently did in my favorite technology tool. More or less, I have a main WP site, with a nested second complete WP site sitting inside of it, yet they are themed and connected to each other in away to make them work as one. For the last two years, I have been running the NMC Campus Observer, a site that documents the projects and events of the NMC’s activity in Second Life. The design of this site is a blow apart of one of the more basic templates, Blix, as described back in May 2006 as WordPress Theme Philosophy. In 2006 there was not a great deal of things happening in education, and I spent a lot of time and energy writing, [...]

For people who mock web 2.0 (heck that includes me), look- you can make a world out of all of those logos! See the Map of the World 2.0, made of 1001 web app logos. This comes from AppAppeal a site that catalogs and reviews web 2.0 sites. See you can do something useful with web 2.0! I tried to locate my home in Arizona, which seems to be appropriately located near the logo for doof, an online game site. Now stop making fun of web 2.0. I will if you will.