CogBlogged from ‘May, 2009’

cc licensed flickr photo shared by cogdogblog It was a while ago I blogged something about Doing Something Solar… I’ve not done a *whole* lot since then, but am planning on some research over the (sunny) summer on what it might take to rig some solar panels into my home grid. The folks at Connect2Earth were nice enough for doing something nice for me- for mentioning of their project, they sent me this cool gift. It is a Solio Hybrid Charger which has panels that can use the sun to fill its battery and in turn, re-charge any device powered by USB type connectors, including the iPhone. I’ve charged the battery up since I got home and will be testing the power of the phone charge (I don’t know if it is me, but my phone seems to charge more fully off of the A/C than my laptop). I can [...]

cc licensed flickr photo shared by cogdogblog From Microsoft’s Audience Intelligence adCenter Labs comes this tool for Demographics Prediction which claims it "predicts a user’s age, gender, and other demographic information, based on their online behavior, such as what queries they search online and what web sites they visit"– based on MSN search which is… well…. not quite *the* web demographic. But the good news is, for people who search sith MSN, the CogDogBlog audience are males less 18. Yeah, right. Of course it does not reveal if these represent 10,000 data points or 10. They explain it: This tool uses a user’s search queries and Web page views to make demographic predictions. The General Distribution results show the age breakdown of MSN Search users, based on a one-month MSN Search log and regardless of search query used. Predicted Distribution depicts the predicted breakdown by age of MSN Search users [...]

cc licensed flickr photo shared by Andrew Mason Ouch, indeed. Once upon a pre-twitter time there was but a few services that offered easy ways to turn long ugly URLs into shorter ones. I might be hard pressed to find someone that has not clicked a TinyURL and I remember at least 5 years ago using notlong. More than a year ago Mashable listed 90 of them. Now there must be about 194 different ones. FactoryJoe tracks more than 100 in a flickr set: is.gd ow.ly beam.to shrtlink tr.im memurl just.as url.ie curio.us? In twitter this are fine as we toss links like free potato chips; but what about if you start using them on your web site? What happens if bt.ly bit.es the.dust? (note- I use bit.ly a lot, easy to create custom names…) I had started using a few bit.ly ones for NMC web sites, but got interested [...]

cc licensed flickr photo shared by ciaranj75 Sometimes it is more obvious what a twitter hashtag means (if the term is new- see the Ultimate Guide to Twitter Hashtags). Regular CDB readers (hi Mom!) might recall I’ve snarked a bit on twitter hashtags which truly was meant in jest. As is everything I right here, all to be taken with large crystals of Sodium Chloride. Hashtags are interesting, because like the @xxxxx notation which now bleeds over into responding to people in comment areas of other sites– were not ever designed by the creators of twitter. They were things done by users and in the case of the @xxxxx notation, it was enough to be rolled into the app. That alone is interesting– the use of a technology in a way not foreseen by its developers can find its way in by just the popularity of its use. So hashtags [...]

cc licensed flickr photo shared by cogdogblog Every few months, I get the urge to wipe out the backlog on unread RSS feed items. It is just a few Shift-A’s to get a nice clean slate (it hardly takes anytime to do the edublogger feeds since no one blogs anymore ;-) Go ahead, I dare you to write a blog post. I might read it.

cc licensed flickr photo shared by ElDave The main navigation of most WordPress sites is driven by cycling through all of the content that are WordPress pages– which is nice, but sometimes you have content that you don;t want cluttering the navbar. Or maybe you want to insert something that is not a Page into the navbar. I’ve been amazed that so few people seem to know how to subvert it, and below is a little trick I use when I want to wedge some other kind of WordPress content into the navbar by Pages process. Mostly this is in your HEAD… I mean the header.php file of your templates that generates it as an Unordered List: <div id="nav"> <ul>   <li class="<?php if (is_home()) {echo 'page_item current_page_item'; } ?>">     <a href="<?php echo get_settings('home'); ?>/">Home</a></li>   <?php wp_list_pages('title_li' ); ?> </ul> </div> The first li item creates the Home link, and in [...]

cc licensed flickr photo shared by ejhogbin Calendar data has always stumped me- on one hand it seems rather structured — something (data) happens on a date (data) maybe at a place (data) but it is something people much more savvy than I struggle with as it gets more complex… but I am not writing about the micro issues of micro data. In the last few years of many travel trips, I’d dabbled with two web based calendar services, which at some level are very similar– both dopplr and trip.it allow you to add events without the manual typing in of things to form– very elegantly by forwarding via email your airline, car rental, hotel reservations — that is oh so smart. For a while I was using both, but ran into some issues with dopplr accepting a second email sender address (I get travel stuff sent to both my [...]

cc licensed flickr photo shared by cogdogblog By request, today I did a presentation on 50+ Web 2.0 Ways to Tell a Story via Skype to a group of faculty at the College of Wooster (Ohio). To do this they had my Skype video on one screen and the other had a web browser open with my series of "slides" as web pages open in Firefox tabs (see the presentation materials). It’s a little tricky because I cant see the audience too well and cannot even see the screen they are watching. But it went great- Jon Breitenbucher et al had done a fantastic job of setting this up by having the participants already fleshed out story ideas. At first I thought the local story prompt I gave them was going flat, but they picked it up crazy. So the prompt was about an unlikely person spotted eating pizza at [...]

cc licensed flickr photo shared by Chandra Marsono Despite Cole’s assertion I have never made a rule about “blogging about not blogging.” This was actually something I heard at a presentation last February at Northern Voice as more of an observation of how often we start a post by “I am sorry I have not blogged I a long time…” or “It’s been so long since I blogged…” Whomever said that made the extension that much of twitter is about tweeting abut tweeting or not tweeting. But is it really new? I can recall writing a few hand written letters, “I am sorry I have not written since last summer…” or we call someone and say, “Wow, it has been 3 months since I called…” Maybe I should be talking about not talking. What was my point? Despite my convictions that blogging is not dead , it sure seems like [...]

2009/365/140 Hanging Out in Payson with @hrheingold by cogdogblog posted 20 May ’09, 10.43pm MDT PST on flickr You never know who will bump into at the Bee Line Cafe in Payson, Arizona. Nah, this was planned. Howard Rheingold was in Phoenix yesterday as a keynote speaker for the 2009 Maricopa Teaching and Learning with Technology Conference. I had hoped to drive down for the conference, but my schedule imploded with things that needed to get done, so I had to opt out of the drive down (yeah leave lovely cool mountain air for 107 degrees). But luckily, Howard had plans to visit one of his friends who lives in Payson, which is only 18 miles from where I live, so we had plans to breakfast at the down home Bee Line (where they have the cutest grumpy old waitresses). Born in Tucson and growing up in Phoenix in the [...]