CogBlogged from ‘October, 2008’

In the November 2008 issue of Wired (which I am reading in old fashioned analog form, reading it on a plane flight), Paul Boutin suggests the blog is dead. 404. Deep Freeze. Passe. SO 2004. Not only Tired, but Long Expired. Kill Your Blog. Still posting like 2004? Well knock it off. There are chirpier ways to get your word out. Thinking about launching your own blog? Here’s some friendly advice: Don’t. And if you’ve already got one, pull the plug. Writing a weblog today isn’t the brightest idea it was four years ago. The blogosphere, once a freshwater oasis of folksy self experssionism and clever thought, has been flooded by a tsunami of paid bilge. Cut-rate journalists and underground marketing campaigns drown out the authentic voices. of amateur wordsmiths. It’s almost impossible to get noticed, except by hecklers. And why bother? The time it takes to craft sharp, witty [...]

I love this 3 minute TED clip of Rives telling a love (or not) story played out in emoticons: (sideline complaint- I installed a new version flash and now about 20% of the web sites, including my own, cannot load the content, WTF?) You know how the motivational thinkers trot out the “thinking outside of the box” phrase (nod nod nod)? For creativity, there are almost interesting things that happen when you are being “creative inside the box” (I made that one up) — when you find a creative way to tell a story in a limited expression form, say the keys on your keyboard. Now the example above really does not fall into that, because what makes it work as much as anything is the live performance. I’m interested in collecting some more things like this, one might chalk ASCII art (now I am showing my generational colors). The [...]

The Lamest Unsubscribe Method Evuh by cogdogblog posted 28 Oct ’08, 10.18pm MDT PST on flickr TeacherTube, blecccch. Never used, and surely never will. I’m trying to winnow down the crap emails form my inbox. Along comes a “newsletter”, unsolicited, unrequested, from TeacherTube. I zipped to the bottom and clicked the “unsubscribe” link. Wouldn’t you think that does what it says? About 99% of these inbox clutterng newsletters actually do what their links says, it confirms that I have been unsubscribed from Uncle Bubbah’s Fish Fry Recipe list, and we part ways. Adios. But not at TeacherTube. First it makes me log in. And plain as day is the unchecked box where I never did check to read newsletters. I always opt out or dont opt in for bacn. So down at the bottom is a link to “delete account”. Wouldn’t you expect if clicked a “delete account” link it [...]

I’m already pretty wired into iGoogle as my home, been so for like, well ever since it came out. But now, Gmail is getting the widget business to, as the Google Labs now offers options to add to the Gmail side bar, small iGoogle-like widgets for seeing your calendar, recent docs, etc. As described in the GMail Blog: To get you started, we’ve worked with the engineers from the Calendar and Docs teams on two highly requested features: a simple way to see your Google Calendar agenda and get an alert when you have a meeting, and a gadget that shows a list of your recently accessed Google Docs and lets you search across all of your documents right from within Gmail. All you need to do is go into your Gmail Settings, click the Labs tab, and enable stuff you want to add to Gmail. On of the most [...]

The editor of EDUCAUSE Review, a good friend and fellow Arizonan, has been nudging me a few years to consider writing an article. Sure I blog a lot, but a publish article requires things like grammar, references, and coherency… so last Spring I suggested co-authoring as a crutch. Over the summer, I was honored to collaborate with Bryan Alexander (that guy can write! We wrote the draft on Google docs and tagged madly our resources) on the article just hitting print/PDF/web in the November/December 2008 issue – Web 2.0 Storytelling: Emergence of a New Genre: We are hoping to stir up some conversation about this, and are eager to have some push-back on our assertion. Our research googling on the topic mainly brought up… us! But as we’ve talked about it in our presentations and workshops, we get lots of nods of agreement. Our article describes Web 2.0 Storytelling as [...]

Inspired by the brilliant twitter love video by Martin I have been thinking of trying my hand at the craft, so here is a promo video for the upcoming NMC Online Symposium on Rock the Academy: Radical Teaching, Unbounded Learning. So I stretch the stereo type of “traditional” academy, but it’s all in fun. And it is all open content. Speaking of fun, that was looking for historic videos and footage at the Internet Archive and the Library of Congress American Memory Collection as well as the usual compfight searches of flickr creative commons, and just biuncing around my feeds and friends for screen captures. Plus I did some rapid googling for screens related to the presentations on our program. There may be a slight weighting of edupunk visuals just cause it is easy to find, fun, and it is Jim. And I did not plan this, YouTube chose the [...]

I just whipped up the puniest of WordPress hacks for the ultimate reasons, to serve myself. If I knew what I was doing, it would be a plugin, but I’ll leave that as an exercise for the reader. Here’s the thing. Whenever I write something, i like to reference by link a previous post. So I have to load my own site to find it, and man, I am tired of waiting. So my hack generates page that just in simple layout lists your latest 100 (or whatever number you wish) posts, so you can either copy the URL or edit it. It makes something like this: The code consists of 2 PHP files and a GIF image that go into your theme directory: http://cogdogblog.com/code/lastposts.zip headless.php is just a simplifed version of header.php with just some CSS in it last.php is a simple template that does all the work images/edit.gif [...]

As a rule (and you know how rules go), the editorial team at CogDogBlog does not delve into political posts, we are too busy pursuing weird web sites and complaining about important things. And certainly the current political election has been an ultra marathon, and I, will miss the finish line while I am in Iceland (despite people sending me that clever CNN video, I am not the one voter who tipped the campaign, and damn that woman with the crutch and the goat herder are mad at me!). No, we do not endorse candidates here. Though I can say I would prefer a president with a well-honed looking into the future pose. As I have already said, by policy we do not discuss political issues here. But to think about that future to stare in, I am having trouble grasping that it might include the insertion into the seat [...]

In looking for interesting technologies, sometimes you have to forge past what at looks like something hardly relevant to education, much the case with what I think is a powerful form of web video technology in Veeple. I stumpled upon this literally about two links of some casual wandering down my RSS feeds. As an aside, I just love accidental finds. Leaving this for a future post, if you are a tech blogger, you want to be able to discover things that are not all covered on all the big named tech blogs like Mashable, engadget, etc which seem to carry the same stories. You want to find things not many have looked at (its nearly impossible to be “first”, but the web is wide enough to be new for your readers). Oh, now this is sounding like a different blog post. Back to Veeple- it is a cloud-based video [...]

I keep active accounts at various sites that pull in my online activity, e.g. Plaxo, LinkedIn, Facebook, but don’t spend a lot of time in there. But Plaxo is now under my fur and a good scratch is not getting rid of this blogging itch. Plaxo let me add appropriate links for it to syndicate in my blog feed, flickr, etc that it publishes as a “pulse”- more than just the feed content, it actually publishes my full content. That is not the smelly part, though they do make the links to the real content rather small and obscure way down at the bottom. It’s how they handle comments. If someone comments on my flickr photo as it is rendered in Plaxo– the comment goes inside Plaxo. This morning, I got a comment from a former colleague to my ACDC in Excel post (why is it the silly posts get [...]