CogBlogged from ‘July, 2008’

If the web is at 2.0, then listserv technology must be at a fractional decimal too small to bother writing. I first experienced them around 1988 as a graduate student at Arizona State University- heck it was even before full internet, as my email address was on BITNET. I helped a prof administer a listerv for volcanologists (no Spock jokes, this was geologist who study volcanoes). A lot of the duties had to do with patching together email addresses on various networks, US universities on BITNET, scientists on various government networks, and people outside the US on all kinds of different networks. flickr creative commons licensed photo by rodliz But the software, and the way it worked has really not changed at all. Listservs are like the rusty old pickup you see parked next to the shiny sports cars and hybrid vehicles – old, but reliable, and often just full [...]

As much as I like to poke fun at twitter’s reliable flakiness and curse the fail whale… For inexplicable reasons, I stay. Again, twitter is not essential. My days go in fine with or without it. What value is it? No… scratch all of that. Twitter just saved me from a huge gaffe. And it would have put web sites for lot of other folks in a spiral too. At 11:30PM June 30, I scanned my Twitter replies tab (which was again working after about a week of “being stressed out”). and saw these two tweets from people I dont really know: @oninformation and @mahlness were noting that my Feed2JS site (Feed to Javascript site, allows people to embed feed content in web pages) was going to a GoDaddy domain parked site. WTF? So I logged into my GoDaddy account, and holy crap! My domain feed2js.org was expiring on June [...]

How about yet one more example of neat things that happen when you share your stuff? This is a photo I posted a month ago on flickr; it is a wooden drafting table my Dad had used back in the 1950s and after years of storage in an attic, I decided to re stain it: Nothing special about the photo (except it had the word “drafting table” in it), just one of several thousand sitting in my bin. I keep an RSS feed for my flickr comments so I know when someone writes something (so I can respond, or just so my ego can get a small stroke), and a day ago came this cryptic comment from a joe:allam: Expect your views of this picture to go up drastically in the next few days. Sure enough, when I went to check, it was up to 82, far above the normal [...]

Don’t ask why, but this snapshot I got a few weeks ago while Skyping with Bryan Alexander, or known to some as “Dr Nemo” reminds me of the mashup I did a few years ago after meeting Doug Engelbart with a screen shot of him from the “Mother of All Demos” Doesn’t Dr Nemo like rather futuristic? Or maybe I just hope someday I can get my beard to be that cool.

CogDogBlog Wordle by cogdogblog posted 1 Jul ’08, 6.26pm MDT PST on flickr Wordle is a way cool visualization tool for making gorgeous tag clouds form text. Like many people, I did the easy thing first- a wordle made from my del.icio.us tags and then played with a not so easy to use tool to generate your flickr tags into text so you could "wordle" it. But I want to think more creatively what to wordle. Hmmmm. So I decide to run a MySQL query to generate all of the titles of my blog posts (going back to 2002): SELECT `post_title` FROM `wp_posts` WHERE `post_status` = ‘publish’ and `post_type` = ‘post’ and exported that list (2050 lines) as a text and plopped it into Wordle. So now I see the things I blog about… RSS, Blog, Spam, Learning, Web, New> Flickr, NMC… Hmmm what would you wordle?

Make Fresa Number 1 on the Pet Charts! by cogdogblog posted 1 Jul ’08, 11.28am MDT PST on flickr I got a comment yesterday on a flickr photo of Fresa The Cute Beagle letting me know her photo was part of a contest at Purina! Congratulations, your photo made the Pet Charts for 7/1/2008! Vote it up the charts at: petcharts.purina.com/Default.aspx?day=2008-7-1 And sure enough when I went t site, my photo was there… but in 10th place! What to do? Vote! Click her icon in the bottom row, and then the Vote Now button. With a little help from my friends on twitter, she has zoomed up the charts, finally knocking that grey cat off the number 1 spot. But I want more votes! Vote now and vote often (ahem other web browsers). Go Do Go A call out to twitter worked well http://twitter.com/cogdog/statuses/847766868 as long as the fail whale [...]

From more in the “where would we be without the web” department. I was chatting with a friend about movies, not a subject I can dare seriously enter with series film freaks, but in talking about “obscure” foreign films, I was trying to remember the name of a Russian one I saw a few years ago that was really moving. So I go to Internet Movie Database, and I am stumped on what to search for as I cannot remember anything from the title or descriptive enough. Next stop? The oracle. As a shot in the search darkness, I google it. I know it was a russian film about boys and a father, it was black and white, and it involved an incident at a tower. So the magic phrase is russian movie boys father black white tower. I should have pressed the I’m Feeling Lucky button cause the answer [...]

I try not to begrudge what others do, but as much as I use (and talk about) mining flickr for creative commons licensed images, I dont know what to make of those who uses a photo sharing site to post photos All Rights Reserved? Okay, I do begrudge. But I dont spent much time there- what is more interesting, uplifting, is the magic that happens when you give something away, when you don’t attach statements of what you cannot do with media you’ve created, but attach statements of what you can do. I have pretty much given away every photo, crappy software, document I have ever created. I gave away a picture of my old car in death valley and got a free music CD. I gave away copies of my old HTML Tutorial, a teacher translated it into Icelandic, and a few years later, I got invited to visit [...]