CogBlogged from ‘July, 2009’

A favorite category of blog posts are ones that start as a comment in someone else’s blog that expands so much it takes root back on your own site. That’s what happened after reading Wes Fryer’s post How are you dealing with TMI? (Too Much Information). I applaud Wes for opening up a topic, but I’m going out on a barking limb here because I read in the comments a long line of head bobbing nodding, and even the question of “how you deal with it” to me begs the answer in a misplaced direction of looking for simple bullet point list answers. However, I have even more push back about this (manufactured) notion of “Too Much Information”. Is that really the situation? cc licensed flickr photo shared by calonda Even before the web, the internet. etc, this world was full of more information than I could possibly manage in [...]

I’ve seen it for a little while but just noticed more carefully that flickr has redesigned the results of its search. Previously you only got 10 results per page that required scrolling to review. Now you get a layout of smaller previews– and this is what is neat- the bigger you make your page, the more results you get per page (so go full screen on that Cinema Display). But even better- there is a little “i” in the lower right corner that when you click it, provides in a lightbox overlay, a bigger preview, numbers of views, tags, dates taken– and if you are searching flickr wide, you can filter out that photographer from the results (I would guess if you think their photos are irrelevant or in appropriate or …?). This was the search for my old dog friend among my photos It’s small, maybe even overdue, but [...]

cc licensed flickr photo shared by riot jane I recently felt like this wistful gal during a recent online seminar- isolated, lonely, and wishing to go outside and play. With nose-diving budgets and more work moving online, it’s time to raise the bar on how we run online events. Like a horrendously designed PowerPoint, no one sets out with a plan of creating a deadly dull online seminar, but they seem to happen often enough. Frankly, since the first kinds I recall seeing in the late 1990s, even with new software, little seems to change and the form feels as tired as a lecture on fungi: Speakers talking non stop over long series of slides; which geometrically and via audio dominate the environment, Audience participants are marginalized to passively listening or ignoring the content while they fritter away on a small text chat area. Or they leave themselves logged in [...]

from TheVine It seems pretty simple. If I post an image on flickr, I go there (or get an RSS feed) to see what comments have been added. If I want to see what people said in response to my blog posts, I go here (or again, read my own feed). Same for YouTube. Any place online I post some media, it makes sense that that is the place to find out what people (in my case, I am just hoping that someone notices) say in response. Not anymore when media gets reposted in other places via feeds. For example, the networking Plaxo (which I visit about 4 times a year) subscribed to my flickr feed, so all my photos are republished in Plaxo, like this one originally posted in flickr: What is really shoddy, and actually violates my flickr creative commons license (by attribution). is that plaxo does not [...]

It’s interesting to get smidgens of insight into how people link to your blog. For a window of time last week I saw an interesting pattern (when was traveling and missed out on the week of celebrity deaths). Look at the keyword searches people used in Google to get to CogDogBlog: It’s all Farrah all the day in the keyword search box linking to my mention of her poster and how it reflected the TV age I grew up in which is now gone. Even more curious is that I paged through 10 pages of Google search results and could not find one link to my blog. People are diving in deep! May they find what they seek…

In some of my recent attempts to get good video on YouTube, I seemed to have been swinging wildly and missing. MPEG-4 video that looked great on my desk top ended up with the voice out of sync with the moving lips. Before going about it again, I sought out (via the Oracle) suggested settings for getting good quality video out of YouTube (you definitely want something bigger than 320x24o since YT makes it bigger. I found what looked like reliable info from the YouTube Community Forums — Here’s Help for Perfect YouTube HD Video Settings! “Perfect” would be nice, my standards are not quire that high. So for the latest video in my previous post, these are the settings I ran through QuickTime Pro (actually via the expert settings exporting from iMovie HD): MPEG-4 (MP4) using H.264 Data rate: 1411 kbits.sec 1280 x 720 image size Frame rate 25 [...]

All the video/app/being-on-the-net-anywhere fun of the iPhone comes at a cost- the limits of its battery life. And yes, you cannot carry a spare. Since I have some long distance travel I’ve been interested in some for the battery boosters for the iDevices. I was almost ready to go for the Richard Solo device– it appears in a lot of the magazines, but in late April I heard on engadget about the mophie juice pack air– it is a battery source of extra power that is built into a plastic case for the phone. Here’s my quick little demo of it in action: It charges up when you charge the iPhone (blue light indicators on the back show how much juice is in the juice pack). There is a standby switch so I run my iPhone battery down, then flip the mophie power on, which then recharges the iPhone. I [...]

see more Lolcats and funny pictures Sometimes your plans work even better then your wildest dreams.

I’ve started doing some Skype video interviews to collect the material for an upcoming Open Education conference presentation on Amazing Stories of Openness. In an email exchange with Leigh Blackall, I thought it could be fun to post a call for stories on YouTube and ask people to respond in video. it seems so web 2.0ish. I’m having problems with what looks like fine MPEG 4 video on my computer upload to YouTube and end up with the voice and video way out of sync, like the badly dubbed Godzilla movies, so here it is hoisted on my own server. It’s still a call for responses, so please reply to the bad synced version on YouTube or post a comment here with a link to your video response. And I have to admit, I need some diversity- so far (self included) my cast mostly all white guys. C’mon ladies and [...]