CogBlogged from ‘July, 2008’

You don’t have to be a “post some silly movie or photo or rant” every day blogger to be effective. When my RSS Reader lights up with a new post from Gardner Campbell, I drop what I am doing to go read. If you are an educator interested in blogging, wiki, web tools for learning, especially (but not exclusively) higher education, stop reading my drivel now and head over to Dr Glu. When he claims to be dashing off scattered thoughts, they are more fluid, meaningful, and well constructed than my most planned writing. That’s one aspect of blogging– if can write really well (not just punctuation or knowing which prepositions are proper in what parts of a sentence– no I mean if you can write in a way that flows like music or poetry… who this pareethetical is way too long and obvioulsy I am not in that category), [...]

Woah! I found out today my old Shockwave projects can breathe again! I cut my multimedia teeth in the 1990s on Macromedia Director. I was happy in the early part of that decade pounding around HyperCard and then came along a project (something to do with Study Skills) that required a lot of animation and there was this software box on the shelf that sounded promising. I never produced or created as much in those Director days. It was the first time I fell into a full blown online social space, the Direct-L listserv (hey it still exists!). I still have some scarred flesh somewhere from some guy named G Gordon III at Virginia Tech who flamed my seriously. It took 3 months from that scorching before I felt okay to post. But around that same time, 1994, I was excited at the hypertext potential of the early early barebones [...]

For no other reason that it was fun to play with, using the cutting web 2.X tools of BombayTV, we have the latest in the tales of edupunk. Grapheine : Webdesigners, illustrateurs, graphistes, agence de com, Paris Lyon A linktribution goes to the Adventures of Bollywood Blackboardwala by Randy Thornton for yielding this site that allows you to write your own sub titles for a clip from a Bollywood movie. Jim, you coulda been somebody, you coulda been a contenda….

If there was a Most Valuable Player award for advancing open content, I would certainly give it to Creative Commons. Remove CC from history, say it never happened, and I wonder if we’d have the awareness of enabling sharing content. I dont want to argue that point, it is a long winded way of saying it is a Good Thing. A damned Good Thing. This relates to an experience I had today the leads maybe to more questions. For quite some time, I have posted my photos to flickr with the simplest CC license, By-Attribution. That’s all I want; I don’t care what you do with my photos, commercial not, how you further license them, whatever. I don’t post them to gain anything, i post them because I like them. If you do, great. So today, as has happened a few times in the past, someone emails me via flickr [...]

OMG, my sides are aching from laughter, just me and my web browser and the GraphJam site which is taglined “Pop cullture for people in cubicles”. People submit Excel generated charts and graphs that illustrate sayings, song topics, or just relationships of things from history or modern life (Found this in the latest issue of WiRed). So the pithy old saying about “thinking my old man was some dumb until I turned 29 and realized how much he learned by then” becomes GraphJammed: more graph humor and song chart memes

Awesome is the new WordPress app for blogging from an iDevice. Writing from iPod Touch on my home wireless. “If I only had a phone…” Note: Republishing in web as TwitterTools did not relay this post sent from iPod

Stand back, set the blog phasers on snark! Before the rant starts (and if you cannot tell from the graphic above it might be juicy) for those that miss my not so subtle reference, do you remember all those times on Star Trek when they said, “Set your phasers on stun”? Did you ever notice, that they never set it on “annihilate”, “zap”, or maybe even just “tickle”? Phasers had pretty much one setting, which begs the question whey they had settings at all (besides the need for said script line). C’mon, my kitchen blender has more settings than a phaser! My day started on such a roll! I drove down to Phoenix this morning for a dentist appointment, and I had no cavities despite being a year late for my six month checkup. An errand for some legal documents did not provide the hassles I expected. I picked up [...]

photo credit: acme Cheese, or more properly, cheese food product, is a wonderful thing. My head is not really exploding from web overdose, but for a break in the action, lacking anything really useful to contribute to the blog-o-sphere, I sometimes resort to the silly. So a few days ago, I decided to spread some comment love by adding something completely irrelevant to posts form my friends. Sure its kind of like spam, but I know, even when I get a goofy off topic comment, it can lift my day. So I posted about 12 blog/flickr comments and a tweet for fun, somehow relating every blog topic I could find to the common world theme of cheddar cheese, and ending with the key magic phrase, “I can haz some” — the latter being a “tag” of sorts so I could see where they might get scraped in by google. As [...]

Hah! I bet I fooled you into thinking this was another rant against evil PowerPoint, eh? Nope, I actually just used it. Here is another series of loosely connected events I try to frame as a “story”. I had seen, perhaps tweeted. that Slideshare (‘the YouTube of PowerPoints) was running a World’s Best Presentation contest. As I like Slideshare as a web service, I smiled, and moved on. Then a few days ago I got an email from someone I did not know asking me to vote for their presentation in said contest. This is typically an email that goes directly to the trash (do not pass go, do not collect my attention), but for some odd reason it clicked. To quote Bill the Cat, my reaction was “Aaaaack” – the one I saw was so bad and smarmy I almost lost my breakfast. So I hit the button the [...]

The rush of new technologies is not quite so different from this image, appropriately titled Armageddon. Among my cloud or network, are colleagues wiping out and restarting their social networks, jumping away from twitter to avoid mcirothinking or just hating twitter, or just pulling in the reigns from every possible social network tossed at them. I feel this same sensation on a periodic basis, be it a blog funk, or that general sit and pause wondering, WTF am I doing does this stuff really matter? And yes, quite often my head feels like it is exploding. Or I am drowning in open web 2.0 water. The mantra I have used is in the sense of “Being There” is to face the future with a wide eyed sense of wonder, even when it is staring directly into a firehose. That’s easy to spout off standing in front of an audience with [...]