Strange as it sounds, today I had to email my Mom a scanned copy of a copy of my own birth certificate to prove her own birth record. And perhaps the most challenging was helping her decode the email attachment so she could print the record.

It goes like this.

Her Florida drivers license is up for renewal and some new regulation (she says) requires her to bring a copy of her birth certificate. The problem is that back in 1929 Baltimore, records were not so rigorously recorded. The daughter of immigrants, whom-ever took the record information probably could not understand the name her mom reported, so Mom’s birth certificate lists her as Baby H********** (Polish sounding name); a later attempt by her parents to update it recorded the wrong name- her name is “Alyce” but the thick accent ended up with her official name being listed as “Ellis”.

But apparently, there is some way for the Maryland authorities to generate a legal certificate if her name appears on the birth certificate of one of her children. I had one in my safety deposit box, so I drove down to Payson today (after rummaging 20 minutes to locate the darn key), and got a xeroxed copy that I planned to scan at home and email.

Interesting information I see in my own Certificate of Live Birth (whew, I was born alive) – coming into this world at 9:22pm in April 1963 at a hospital that no longer exists. Also interesting to note is that it lists my father’s occupation, but there is not even a blank for one if my mother had an occupation. Yes, not that long ago…

Even more sobering is noticing that my parents were 36 and 34 when I was born, getting to 10 years younger than I am now. That makes for some kind of time distortion field effect.

So I got home, scanned the docs and emailed them to Mom, knowing full well she suffered with attachment challenges (the email kind). Sure enough, I get a call, when she tried to print they came out way too small. I was trying to sort out what the problem was, and dreading trying to remotely troubleshoot her NetZero web based email.

But we persevered, What worked was I was able to log into her account, see the same screens– and OMG what an interface travesty that is, I do not blame her confusion. It showed only small previews of the images, and to print them, I had to talk her through the steps to download the image (and ignore some Windows attempt to have her upgrade some crappy photo software package). And then since we had to wait 4 minutes to download the files via her dial-up modem, we had time to chat

Finally, she had the document printed, and she was rather excited (and technically worn out). I tried to soft pedal offering regular tech support, but she is my Mom, I will oblige.

After all of this, she should be able to get her license renewed. Now if I wanted to keep her off the roads, I might have…. just kidding.

Mom, consider yourself certified.

A few years ago I started some conference presentations with a sloppy attempt of a disclaimer, leaning on my own familiar TV metaphor of Sargent Schultz from Hogan’s Heroes and his classic yodel of “I Know Nothing!”. I was trying to deploy it in the sense of “I am not an expert” (Yes, I am a card carrying member of the Imposter Syndrome Club).

But Schultz’s method was one of being deliberately ignorant of what he observed, as some means of staying out of trouble.

I tried to use Schultz though, taking it down the path of what I learned when researching my facts on Hogan’s Heroes, weighing what I read about the character backgrounds on Wikipedia- I asked library experts among NMC members about what “trusted references” they would use to research the background of TV actors – these include reference books such as “Encyclopedia of Television” ($675) and “Television Characters” ($75) or subscription databases services such as the Gale Group (and I wandered down thr tangential lane of noting actor Robert Crane’s mysterious death in an apartment complex less than half a mile from where I lived then).

I was trying to ask about what the new notions of “expertise” were and if maybe “expertiness” in the Colbertian sense was sometimes enough. Or maybe it was a problem.

Yet I continue to see places where people continually market their expert skills, they spend each day showing the world what they know. I’ve alluded before (and will again, and will never reveal) that I subscribe to one particular blog, one which has 100 times as many readers and 1000 times as many twitter followers than me (therefore I am jealous), that almost regularly contains some of the most noxious self inflating writings I have ever come across.

Obviously, all those followers know something I don’t. But reading that keeps me grounded.

Or today, someone twitter me a link to 33 Signals Of An Alpha Social Media Evangelist. Some of them are things that many people do who maybe are not alpha leaders / A-Listers per se:

1. They are informers, usually using tools such as Twitter to spread links that point to information-rich articles.

2. They are giving away valuable things for free, such as how-to articles, video tutorials, etc.

3. They are usually early adopters, with things such as new tech gadgets or trendy social network sites.

But then I wonder at:

5. They usually have a lot of fans for their own Facebook pages.

18. Their profiles usually can be found on Wikipedia or their own Google Profiles.

19. On Twitter, they tend to have a huge amount of followers (i.e. 100,000+) and get listed 1,000+ times.

24. They usually have a “verified account” stamp for their Twitter profiles.

I was unsure if the author was 100% serious or tongue in cheek.

In particular, having a huge number of twitter followers is a serious false positive IMHO, and in this month’s Wired magazine, Clive Thompson nailed it with “in Praise of Online Obscurity”:

I’ve heard this story again and again from those who’ve risen into the lower ranks of microfame. At a few hundred or a few thousand followers, they’re having fun — but any bigger and it falls apart. Social media stops being social. It’s no longer a bantering process of thinking and living out loud. It becomes old-fashioned broadcasting.

The lesson? There’s value in obscurity.

After all, the world’s bravest and most important ideas are often forged away from the spotlight — in small, obscure groups of people who are passionately interested in a subject and like arguing about it. They’re willing to experiment with risky or dumb concepts because they’re among intimates. (It was, after all, small groups of marginal weirdos that brought us the computer, democracy, and the novel.)

And that is where I want to be, so here I wave my own flag of ignorance–

cc licensed flickr photo shared by futureatlas.com

Rather than boasting what I know, or all the 1-2-3 steps You Should Do To Be As Successful as Me (plus the Link to My Book You Should Tell Your Friends About, I am going to tell you how little I really know.

• I am a lousy, sloppy programmer. I know enough PHP to make web sites, tinker with systems like WordPress or drupal, but my approach is more sledge hammer- keep piling on code til it works. I don;t do structured programming, my code is not optimal. And most of it is marginally tested beyond my own uses.
• Almost any technical question someone asks me, I cant recall on the spot. I’ve built up a lot of expert reputation because I google something and send the results back. That is not what I know at all. The same goes for questions on “best technologies for X” or “Is there a software tool that will do Y”– if you think I am pulling from my brain, you are sadly mistaken
• I am not all that well read. Or maybe I just don’t remember it much. I can’t quote the ideas of famous philosophers or education theorists, I”ve not read many of the great works. My 12th grade English teacher was so dull, I experienced her classes playing LP records of a reading of Julius Ceaser by placing my head like I was reading the book in my lap, and snoozing. I can’t sit at social gatherings and effectively banter whether Blah Blahs sense of pacing was reserved due to her Puritan upbringing or if So and so’s use of symbolism was immature. It has nothing to do with not enjoying reading, it’s more not being that engaged in the talking or posturing about reading.

  So while I feel like one of the Clampets in a literary circle, I am trying to hang with the loose group of Motley Readers doing some shared reading of Joyce’s The Dubliners this month. But I am not trying to share what I think I am supposed to say about it (be googling around)– I am just going about it on my own.

• I’m lucky if I can remember the title of a movie I saw, much less memorize the pilot or peel back the meaning. I’ve hung around with some of my other colleagues that can back and forth with vivid details from movies they saw 10 years ago, or be able to compare on Director’s lighting choices with another. Thank you for my offline writing and references when I can reach into IMDb to fill in the neural gaps.

  And I find it fun to maybe try and latch on better to pop culture references that are not always readily at my recall. So I can banter with Jim Groom and joke that the “CogDog Abides” to a reference that runs through his DNA. I can do it asynchronously! It’s not about faking your knowledge, but it is about trying to figure out how to tap in deeply to something you don’t have instant recall on. The same goes for song lyrics- you can find online the text version of the words from almost any song, copy it, paste it, re-write a few words into the theme of something you are blogging about– and you’ve tapped into a pop culture bit.

There’s a lot more that I Don’t Know, but I am getting tired of writing — it would take me the rest of my life.

So there. I don’t “know” a lot of things– to me this is an opportunity, cause how dull would it be to be Such A Great Expert That Knows it All (and Charges You $25,000 to Bring it as a Workshop)? I’d hate such a burden. But that’s me down here happy in ignorant obscurity-ville. That just means I am jealous of the shiny people.

And I think the continued propping up of Pompous Self-Inflated Windbags as “experts to follow” is crappo deluxe.

Dear CogDogBlog Spammers,

Thank you for your loyalty over the last 7 years, your patronage was never wavered, and your activity has continued to grow over the years. Your work is a tribute to perseverance in your discipline, and I am sure your clients, the various pill retailers, online gambling parlors, body enhancement providers all have prospered greatly because of your sheer genius.

But I have been stingy in keeping your daily, hourly, often Russian, flow of wisdom to myself. Until now, I have vigorously kept a chain link fence around this blog with various anti-spam plugins, but I wanted to let you know that the guard dog has been chained and you shall sometimes be let in the yard…

… well, that is, after I edit your stupid-ass comment’s URL and email address. I thus leave your poetic comments to be available to all of the readers here who have been missing out the pleasure I have been hoarding myself by moderating your steady torrent of activity.

with sheer love and affection,
CogDog

In the morning I noticed my DVD player was still on after watching a movie last night. I’m not sure why I started thinking this, but the machine just sits there flashing "No Disc" for hours, for ever if I let it.

Reality and rationality are just no fun.

Yes, isn’t more interesting to toy with the notion that machines are not cold lifeless entities?

By the way the video that left the machine was The Blues Brothers– such high brow stuff I know, but its plain silly fun, especially the long rolling opening sequence that stays serious for much longer than you think it could.

And scenery setting jamming of John Lee Hooker playing outside of the Soul Food Cafe, and the tussle that takes place at the end of that scene, arguing over a song?

Sing it… Boom Boom Boom.

This morning I was doing a Google Image search (more often these days I am using the advanced options to filter out images licensed for re-use) and was surprised/curious about what I saw at the bottom of the results:

Google Social Search was rolled out in October but I missed that one. From what I saw, it’s not only pulling media from your “social circle” but also from things and people they create or link to.

A lot of people write about New York, so if I do a search for [new york] on Google, my best friend’s New York blog probably isn’t going to show up on the first page of my results. Probably what I’ll find are some well-known and official sites. We’ve taken steps to improve the relevance of our search results with personalization, but today’s launch takes that one step further. With Social Search, Google finds relevant public content from your friends and contacts and highlights it for you at the bottom of your search results. When I do a simple query for [new york], Google Social Search includes my friend’s blog on the results page under the heading “Results from people in your social circle for New York.” I can also filter my results to see only content from my social circle by clicking “Show options” on the results page and clicking “Social.”

Yes, Uncle Google, your favorite Borg, is now mining your contacts and links in your Google profile. More info here….

Check it out, every Google user has a social circle at http://www.google.com/s2/search/social#socialcircle where mine revealed:

This is the network of connections Google uses to identify relevant social search results. It is based on a combination of the following:

* Direct connections from your Google chat buddies and contacts (32)
* Direct connections from links listed on your Google profile (259) such as Twitter and FriendFeed
* Secondary connections (3899) that are publicly associated with your direct connections

This and a whole bunch of more ways to filter your search results are there under the “options” link that I’ve been ignoring for months. So if I do a search on Arizona Place Names, I can drill into my social search using the options link:

And from those results, I can filter down to the social connections of one person listed in my “circle”.

I’m not sure how I might use this, but its one of those little cards to file away in your deck of web tricks.

You can set up a site instantly, with no account needed upfront, and that in itself is humbly elegant, but the real fun is when you send an email with a link to media in it, an attached image or video– and it knows how to render those media types right in the page, even with embedded players for audio and video.

I’ve been meaning to write about it for a while; I’d set up some sites at NMC with the hopes others would contribute things like cool technology or stuff for the Horizon Report. Not a whole lot happened there besides me and one colleague, and then a bunch of spammers, so I turned off the open submissions because everything needs moderation.

But I am not wanting to go far into the bits and bytes and knobs and sliders… I wanted to share an example that has worked out quite nicely.

It’s been a real perk working at NMC to have had a few opportunities to interact with the legendary Doug Engelbart and recently we have been working with the Engelbart Institute to host a historic video archive.

Having seen some of the earlier above attempts to try an “Engelbartian” approach to knowledge gathering (the posterous examples), Doug’s daughter contacted me a two weeks ago to ask if the same kind of tool could be set up to collect birthday greetings for Engelbart’s upcoming 85th birthday.

It took about 3 minutes in posterous to set it up, and maybe another 15 to tweak the template a little. With some outreach, we’ve been seeing a steady stream of wishes come in from all over the place who have connections with Engelbart, as well as from family (the kids and grandkids seem to have been numbered There are some great photos that have been shared:

And the beauty is that all of this has come from people posting to the site by sending an email. Today (January 29) is really the day to add yours, as the birthday day is on January 30.

How hard is it?

Please share your birthday greetings with Doug Engelbart in celebration of his 85th birthday on January 30, 2010 sending an email to post@engelbart85.posterous.com — your entire message, and any media you choose to include as an attachment (e.g. photos, videos, and audio recording) will be added to this web site.

So far we have 40+ messages that have arrived in about the last 10 days. Check it out at http://engelbart85.posterous.com/ (spammers don;t waste your time- we moderate everything, and all you accomplish is making my grouchy on the delete button).

There is a lot more to say about posterous (including some quirks in the interface), but what it does is lovely.

http://www.myfreakyblog.org/index.php?s=cheddar+cheese

And with my mediocre JavaScript tools, I made a site that allows anyone yo make one for their own blog– the Make A WordPress Search Bookmarklet tool — which to my utter surprise, still works.

It’s prety easy- you enter the name of the blog, its base URL, and click “Build The Bookmark”- drag the generated JavaScript link to your toolbar, and you are done.

So for example, let’s say I have some B movie blog I want to make the tool for, I enter its name, the URL (http://bavatuesdays.com/), and shazam, I can search the Bava no matter where I am browsing:

And from there it runs the search for me- oh, what a surprising result!

Seriously, Jim, just wanted to share that this is a tool I use all the time as I try to find the old references in my blog.

Harumph, that’s me reading an analog book and marking it up. WTF?

A few months ago and an NMC Board meeting, Gardner Campbell conjectured the idea to try and create some sort of online reading group among our community. The idea bubbled a bit (I was pondering using BookGlutton, I love their way of sharing readings of e-texts), but Gardner circled back with another interesting idea we are now experimenting with.

Over in Texas where he directs the Academy of Teaching and Learning and Baylor University, Gardner was already planning to host a New Media Seminar for faculty, more or less, applying the syllabus he has done so successfully for years as an undergraduate course From Memex to YouTube: An Introduction to New Media Studies.

I cannot give justice to a description, but if you ever had heard Gardner do a presentation, you can imagine how electric he would be for an entire semester– he leads students through the history of ideas and innovations that gave rise to modern computers and this internet landscape that seems familiar to many of us, focusing on the ideas and the people who made this happen. I’ve heard him describe more than once the joy of seeing his students light up in amazement after reading what might be seen as “old” essays on this New Media history.

In his role to support faculty development at Baylor, Gardner is this semester running an in-person faculty seminar with a similar syllabus — New Media as a Platform for Integrative Learning: A Faculty Development Seminar. And thus we hatched the idea to create a way for people beyond this group to be part of the seminar- not everything that there like a Massively Online Open Course, but doing the same readings, watching the same videos, and then we will have both the Baylor group and anyone else following along from afar engage in discussions in an online shared space.

Being an outside participant is completely voluntary, and if you want, you can just lurk, but we think it will be much better if you are right in the mix.

Well that is the plan, it is loosely joined and likely sometimes out of control.

What we are doing at NMC is communicating to people about this, and every Monday (the Baylor group meets Tuesday afternoons) I am posting an audio interview with Gardner where we will recap what happened the week before and then he does some foreshadowing about what is coming the next week.

You can find our resources at http://www.nmc.org/nmfs. So far, we have two podcasts-one (Introduction to the New Media Faculty Development Seminar) is where Gardner describes the seminar and what people can expect to do as a remote participant, and then just posted 2 days ago, the summary for week 1.

At the core of the seminar are a series of essays in The New Media Reader, a work I have heard Gardner lavishly reference for years. So we had a joke in the first seminar that “yes there is a required textbook” — while a number of the essays are online, we recommend getting the Old Fashioned Book (I got mine for less than $40 on Amazon dirt cheap comparde to even the last college textbook I bought more than 20 years ago).

The essays this week include

• The New Media Reader preface by authors Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Nick Montfort
• Inventing the Media, introduction by Janet Murray (excerpt available as PDF)
• As We May Think (1945) essay by Vannevar Bush, published in The Atlantic

I’ve known of As We May think, but today was my first complete reading, and oh, was my highlighter busy. While the mechanics of the memex may seem crude (the drawings with belts, levers, and microfilm) the functions and the concepts are prescient, even to what I saw described as gesture interface, the retrieval of information that is just a verb today. Plus Bush foresaw that a hierarchical card catalog organizaing scheme would not serve a complex body of information–

Our ineptitude in getting at the record is largely caused by the artificiality of systems of indexing. When data of any sort are placed in storage, they are filed alphabetically or numerically and information is found (when it is) by tracing it down from subclass to subclass… The human mind does not work like that way. It operates by association.

And in a few more paragraphs Bush is describing what we call the “semantic web” as well as the connections among “a trail of his interest through the maze of materials available to him” — voila! hypertext makes it happen. The one piece I noted missing in the memex as that it sounds like it was a solitary experience- one person and the machine, far from the social connectivity and human networks we find vital in 2010.

So here’s what to do if you want to participate

• Get the book. Yeah, old media, dead trees, but the ideas in these essays are more alive then ever. Let Gardner the master teacher light them up for you.
• Join the online forum. We will keep it open a little while, but this is the place the remote audience will engage with each other and the Baylor group.

It’s all an experiment, so I hope some of you are willing to join us for the ride. Light up your Harleys and your highlighter pens.

Some of my favorite software moments are accidentally discovering something new in a tool I’ve been using for some time. This happened recently my my current iPhone Twitter client, Tweetie 2. I’m not writing about this app, but I’d heard people rave about it, shrugged them off, then eventually later found out they were right. It is smartly designed.

I’d noticed when looking at someone’s profile that there is a number below their icon… (and actually I was not ego-ing my own profile, its just an example) (seriously) (I swear).

So what is #740,343? Perhaps its obvious, but I wanted to know. Maybe it is some sort of ranking, like I am the 740,343rd ranked tweeter. Yeah, I could only dream to rank that high.

My hunch was/is that it is more or less my database ID in twitter, a user number, and therefore, the lower the number, the earlier you joined. (later– this makes sense when looking at my RSS URL http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/740343.rss)

I looked at a few accounts I know are recent (this year), and sure enough they are in the #16,000,000’s. And then I looked at Cole Camplese’s profile, cause I more or less followed him in January 2007 when he started blogging about twitter:

Sure enough, he is #690,253 a little before me (scooped again by the Senator from Pennsylvania!).

I cannot even think of the value of knowing this is, besides scratching the curiosity itch.

But next, I was curious about the little card icon– like here in Scott Leslie’s profile:

Nice, look at the big number– #3,567,831 – courtesy of the great Jaiku walkout, eh?

But here was a nice feature, clicking the card icon added info from this twitter profile to my address book:

It added his twitter icon, twitter URL, and below the fold, his mini bio in a notes field.

This again, is hardly world changing, or even significant, but it struck me as a nicely, understated feature in Tweetie 2 (and its primary features are plenty enough as is).

So what have you found my clicking mystery buttons? Probably more than me….

cc licensed flickr photo shared by Impact Tarmac

One can always try to blog like NOBODY. But that’s not the point either.

On my travels, I’ve been reading bits of Armageddon in Retrospect, the collection of Kurt Vonnegut’s post—, um….. stuff written after he died.

It was not Kurt’s words that lept from the page, but those in the intro written by his son Mark (trying to imagine growing up with Kurt Vonnegut as a father).

Reading and writing are themselves subversive acts. What they subvert is the notion that things have to be the way they are, that you are alone, that no one has ever felt the way you have. What occurs to people when they read Kurt is that things are much up for grabs than they thought they were. The world is a slightly different place just because they read a damn book. Imagine that.

Substitute for “book” blog, video, story, etc, anything we create– and share, then it strikes at the heart of things that we find others feel the way we do, and things turn out to be much more up for grabs than we even suspect.

Take this as a subtle foreshadowing of some things I am scheming down the line.

After a copy of a letter he wrote to his parents after his WWII experience, the book jumps to Kurt Vonnegut’s speech at Clowes Hall in his home town of Indianapolis, April 27, 2007 (hey that’s my birthday) in Indianapolis– his last speech, and woven together a thread of those thoughts that his son describes above.

His parting words, looking at what feels like dark times:

And how should we behave during this Apocalypse? We should be unusually kind to one another, certainly. But we should also stop being so serious. Jokes help a lot. And get a dog, if you don’t have one already.

See why he speaks to me? “Don’t be serious, get a dog!” He then moves on to a silly joke:

I myself just got a dog, and it’s a new crossbreed. It’s half French poodle and half Chinese shih tzu.

It’s a shit-poo.

And I thank you for your attention, and I’m out of here.

Those were Vonnegut’s last public words. A beautiful exit. “I’m out of here.”

So let me re-iterate– our words, all of us, ours ways of expression, not just books and written form, can be positively subversive.

More to come….