CogBlogged from ‘July, 2009’

cc licensed flickr photo shared by cogdogblog I’m almost done the first round of video editing prep for Amazing Stories of Openness for the OpenEd conference. Going well. My plan during my presentation is to give context of each video I have acquired, and play a short clip, but provide the full interview clip as a reference. I am going to tell a few of my own, and thus, today I realized I should record my own freaking stories. The last time I did this, when I issued the Call for Stories (for which those who ignored may may dearly), I recorded it with my Flip Mino HD (the NMC 2009 edition, still available at http://shop.nmc.org) I kept doing short test clips to get the camera set up right. It occurred to me today it would be easier if I just set up a mirror on the desk as a [...]

It’s possible there’s more out there than I know, but I see social media apps that offer great models for connecting people with similar interests, but wonder where is that for education? Today, I came across Micro.Vois– a simple idea that seems elegant, built on (what else these days?) twitter click to see full image It simply connects people based on hashtags in tweets to connect freelancers with people who might have work, or people looking for freelancers. So if you are needing, say, a CSS guru or a 3D animator, you just tweet something that has #havework, and if you are someone with skills like Flash Programming or Game Design, you tweet #wantwork, and Micro.Vois tries to put them side by side. This is compelling because (a) it is simple, and (b) the “posting” can be done in the flow of your regualr twitter communication (which we all know [...]

I’ve been mumbling in twitter (like anyone notices) about a very interesting data gathering/visualizing tool that rides the back coat tails of twitter in a clever way. I’ll spill the beans first, but stick around for the story and the after blog coffee, okay? Your Flowing Data (YFD) is described by its creator, Nathan, as “a Twitter application that lets you collect data about yourself.” but that does not really capture the magic essence. I stumbled here in one of those lovely incidents of web serendipity aka happy accidents. I was being interviewed last week by someone asking about emerging technologies, and I mentioned being interested visualizations of data. We started talking about great sites and tools- I mentioned Information Aesthetics and the interviewer mentioned another site called Flowing Data a blog about “Data and Visualization (subtitle “Strength in Numbers:). It took about one glance and I was subscribing to [...]

cc licensed flickr photo shared by cogdogblog They do. I want the world to know. (this is an hour after my second request submitted to their support email for help) Twas not a happy experience last 2 days with Dreamhost and a migration to their “private server” experience…. I had not responded to their first offers on this, and they came back with a 33% off, and after reading a a bit on it, decided to gamble. Maybe a bad dice roll, but (despite my last hours of made twittering) am holding off on the complete “They Suck” conclusion. When they migrated my database, my site went down for a few hours with “database connection error” – I could not log into MySQL through any means. I submitted a report and they did fix after a fwe hours citing a need to refresh the database ,permissions (essentially I was locked [...]

cc licensed flickr photo shared by crabchick There’s something afoot abut data. Whether it is Sir Tim’s vision of a Web of Data (or is it the W3C Linked Data?), there is something emerging with not only the availability of more data (heck even the government is on it http://www.data.gov) but more what we can do with it… Tom Coates was on this early noting that (in 2008 at least) 90% of twitter activity was not at twitter.com web site but through the APIs that allow data (small bits) to flow in and out. It is something I marvel at on a daily basis trying to follow the tracks of Tony Hirst who weaves magic with data. I’m toying with something I hope to blog about i a few days that is prying open a whole pack of neurons for me in terms of “potential for something big and cool [...]

cc licensed flickr photo shared by cogdogblog In honor of Dominoe, who left this world July 24, 1993. Yesterday’s addictive diversion was flipping through my old analog photo albums pulling photos to scan for Remembering Dominoe. But I missed another major back story part of the story. It was in 1986 when my room-mate Kevin told me about the run away dalmatian that someone found. When I took her to the vet, he made a wild guess how old she was– he actually said 7 at the time, which later seemed an over estimate since she lived another 7 years beyond that (yes, I know dogs can grow into their teens, another friend’s Weimaraner was like 19). So maybe she did make it to 14. It’s not like you cut open a paw and count tree rings. Morbid joke there, folks. But this story is what happened after we made [...]

cc licensed flickr photo shared by [phil h] I’m a huge fan of CoolIris, the browser plugin that turns media content into an amazing flowing virtual wall. It is hands down one of the best ways to explore flickr or YouTube searches, since results are not limited to one page, it becomes endless flow. cc licensed flickr photo shared by cogdogblog Since February, I have been crafting a lot of my presentations in the CoolIris format, using the form of RSS to drive the content I pick- see my documentation on Tricking Out CoolIris as a Presentation Tool as well as the step by step instructions posted by Doug Belshaw. The reason it works for me is the way I can associate “slides” with a URL so I can jump out to a web page and easily return to the presentation- or it is seamless to jump around. cc licensed [...]

cc licensed flickr photo shared by cogdogblog Today was the sad, sad day in 1993 when Dominoe had to be put down. Since she was the big star of my

It’s been a while but it is time to add to my collection of WordPress Dissected where I break down web sites I have been building using WordPress but with some moderate to severe template wrangling. Today I present an NMC project set that is sort of a Zen Riddle. If a blog has no posts is it a web site? This is the editing area for a finished web site: How? Why? The web site is made up entirely of WordPress pages, because there is nothing chronological in the site’s structure (though if we ever added a news section it would be easy). There was a reason I organized it around Pages… and I cannot remember why, but had something to do with being able to list the pages in a sidebar. I think. To be honest, the work started more than a year ago and the site sat [...]

With our growing number of NMC organizations in Australia I’ve been exploring/wondering of ways to better connect and grow this community down under. I’ve been doubtful of the connectivity possibility (mainly the audio) of our Adobe Connect room we use for our monthly seminars. The built in tool that provides data on a user’s local network latency (the little green chicklet in the upper right corner) has shown in our testing that when this hits above 270 msec audio loss kicks in– I suffer from this myself with my rural cable connection, and in some tests yesterday with colleagues in Brisbane, they were getting latency well over 300. We did have some interesting success with a smaller scale group meeting tool– ooVoo (crazy ASCII like name, eh)? a tool for doing video chat. We were able to have pretty clear video conversation between me here in Arizona, and colleagues Phil [...]