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…

Related posts:

1. Asking the Google-able
2. Logogle – Make Yourself Into Google
3. SciencePORT: Scientists Get Fed Here

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 320×24o 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 fps
• Key Frame: automatic
• Under Video Options- Best Quality (multi-pass)
• AAC Audio, 44.1 kHz, 128 kbps

This brought my 76 second video in at 13.9 Mb!

I don’t profess these to be the absolute best, Nor am I saying that there are not tools to do this work for you– but so far so good (one video!)

Related posts:

1. If YouTube is not weird enough, yooouuutuuube it
2. Video Call (two strikes already) for Amazing Stories
3. I Invented YouTube

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 get at least one full charge and there are still 1 or 2 lights lit up, si estimate I might get another 40% charge out of it. I do agree with what others have said the sliding the top case off the mophie is a little tricky; it seems to require some extra force, and when it doe snot nudge one begins to wonder if it will snap.

The mophie adds a little bulk to the device, but for not having to have a battery brick, its impressive. I was eager for mine, so I pre-ordered mine and paid for 2 day shipping for the April 21 launch since I was leaving the 30th for a 2 week east coast trip. Frankly I expected by pre-ordering, the thing would ship on April 21, but it was almost a week later I had not heard from them. I did email and got a very quick response from Rebecca there, and she pushed the right buttons so that it came the day before I left town.

That scored some points in my book. What I did not know for a long time is (and I am guessing) since I complained about not getting it within the time frame promised, they ended up crediting me back the entire amount I paid for it (unless they just made a billing goof). So it has been free.

One small downside is the little mini USB like hookup the mophie uses to connect to the internal connector of the iPhone- you use a special cable that has regular USB on the other end so you can charge it from a computer or from the standard iPhone plug charger. This does mean I cannot power it in my car, where I have a cigarette lighter attachment to a standard iPhone dock. I could charge it by yanking it out of the mophie case.

The other thing is that the little mini USB port on the mophie might be fragile– probably because I had mistakenly got the mini USB plug in upside down, I managed to dislodge the plug from the inside, and once loose it became detached and in essence, the mophie was dead and could not get a charge. If you scan the comments in the c|net review of the mophie, you hear that this happens at some frequency for people.

The mophie customer support was really responsive for me, and I shipped the busted to them and got a new one in return soon after. I’m being a bit more careful with checking the cable orientation before connecting it.

All in all I am happy with the battery boost the mophie gives. I am usually putting on for travel, and going back to a basic case at home (in the car where I use it for my stereo I can just hook it to the DC power)– and more, I;ve ben happy to get good customer service, a refreshing change from the experience with other companies.

Related posts:

1. Battery Mysteries
2. iSolar
3. While I Was Sleeping (I Was Not Charging Your iPod)

Sometimes your plans work even better then your wildest dreams.

Related posts:

1. Watch Out for those Sneaky Cats

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 folks from outside the US? But I am not picky, white guys are still welcome.

call for amazing stories (quicktime)

In my first cut of shotting the video, I used the laptop camera on my MacBookPro and spoke audio into my headset mike. The audio was pretty shabby, and started out out of sync.

So I redid my monologue, using my Flip Mino sitting on a GorillaPod. With no one at home, it was a bit of trial and error (out-takes not) to get the shot aimed right. I edited it quickly in iMovie (I am still using the 2 versions back one). I add titles, and I like to separate the audio track to I can cut and drop in some still images. I also went to ccMIxter for some background music- Happyhappyrainbows by colab.

I save mine as broadband high quality MPEG-4, which comes in at 640×480. I uploaded to YouTube, and the web version was way out of sync. I redid it at medium quality and same result. I don’t understand what YouTube is doing in the processing, but it is borked. I give up.

Sometimes, you just have to say, it ain;t gonna work, and move on.

You can also send me some details on your story via the Google Form at the bottom of http://cogdog.wikispaces.com/AmazingStories. I am really excited about the bits I got so far, and I have a fun reto idea for the presentation in Vancouver.

Related posts:

1. Seeking Your Amazing Stories of Openness
2. Swinging a Dead Cat at Video Settings for YouTube
3. Tell John about Do Not Call

Yep my internet grandchildren, Old CogDog remembers when e-mail was pretty much it for everything on online activity, long before junk mail, phishing, spam, twitter, facebook. blogs, heck before the web.

It;s refreshing when something nice just lands in thr box, and makes you pause and smile. Today’s gift:

Hi Alan,

I am a secretary at [Xxxxxx], and a bit of a tech geek, so I have been following your blog since you presented at our [school]. Anyway, I am sure you have already seen this, but on the off chance you haven’t…

This site will compare bing and google search results side by side.

http://www.furia.com/code/bg/bg.cgi

I picture the shy secretary secretly tweeting and blogging, and the fact that this person decided to share something forward the old fashioned way, well heck, it’s just making me smile.

As I wrote in the reply:

That is so kind of you to share, and to pull the curtain back, I do NOT see everything out there and rely on other people to share, so thanks

(and my choice of photos above is a bit slanted, I could not find a bing box, so sue me)

Related posts:

1. More Stupid, Absurd Email Spam
2. Jolly Well! Britain Gets in On Email Bank Spam Scam
3. If You Are Going to Spam Me By Email, At Least Make Me Laugh

That keynote speaker, is he talking to me?

Yep.

In his ED-MEDIA presentation on Beyond Management: The Personal Learning Environment, slide 14, Stephen describes the process that is at the core of his activity (16,000+ posts since 2001!), which he named in honor of little ole me as ARRFF:

or Aggregate, Remix, Repurpose, Feed Forward.

Stephen was firing on all pistons, and had some great lines on the difference between complicated things and complex things, mesh networks versus star networks, the mystery of the hidden flash animation, the myth of solitary autonomy, some things about butterflies and more. You can catch the audio on his site at http://www.downes.ca/presentation/225

ARRFF! ARRFF! ARRFF! ARRFF! ARRFF! ARRFF! ARRFF! ARRFF! ARRFF! ARRFF!

Related posts:

1. Free Places To Hang Your Media?
2. Shining Up CoolIris For ED-MEDIA
3. Power of Old Media in New Orleans

It went fine, I had fun, people laughed at the Blabberize Alpaca. There is an audio recording coming from EDMEDIA, which is going to be full of me popping my p’s a bit loudly. It was a few days before that I realized I was missing a key cultural reference:

Hawaii 50+ Ways the trailer

Going into this I felt I needed something new as an angle. ED-MEDIA is a big international conference, and swirls around the thousands of papers presented. Egads, I needed something academic?

I’m really ready to hang it up and retire the shtick. This time I tried to take a tack of emphasizing some things I suggested were more important than the tools, some things I called “the craft” and aimed to hang them on some of the examples.

• A story must clearly arc to an end, to a “punchline.”
• Distill a story down to only its most necessary elements.
• If you cannot create media, modify or re-purpose.
• Think and tell in metaphors and symbols.
• Be creative within a limited tool set.
• The act of locating media is a key craft

I did get the audience to join in the group story game where they had to contribute to the prompt:

Under a Full Moon, Last Night I Saw The Strangest Thing Happen On Waikiki Beach

(as usual) it involved Elvis singing “Blue Hawaii” and then he was dancing with a shark… someone has to wrap that one up.

And also as usualy lots of people want t know what software the presentation was done in.

“That’s the web”

and it is! It’s just images, some RSS, and the CoolIris plugin– all building on what I outlined in CoolIris as a Presentation tool. It’s a bit easier now to run your own image slide shows, even from your desktop, and Scott Leslie keeps pounding at other ways to create shows– but to me, the most powerful method is rolling your own RSS feeds since you can then define the web link for each slide. That is the reason I use CoolIris as it is nearly ideal for doing presentations about web sites because of the way it moves back and forth from presentation to web and back.

A few new wrinkles I tossed in this time:

• For candy on the eye candy, I added my own logo to the CoolIiris menu bar. Easy stuff.
• Ever since May, something changed in either CoolIris or Flash (and no one is owning up) so that my previously working FLV videos that played inside the CoolIris wall now refused to play. They just spin and spin and spin, and CoolIris is not even acknowledging this as a bug. I ran an end around by doing anormal image and link to a web page– a page I created that autoplayed my flash video in a web player- e,g, http://cogdogblog.com/stuff/50ways/hawaii-50-ways.html
• Almost by accident– yes it was an accident or a typo– I found a new CoolIris trick. The normal thing is to make a thumbnail image by making copy of the full size image but smaller dimensions II do mine as 240 pixel wide JPEGs). While testing, I had noticed that I had a thumbnail of a different image than the full size- and when played in CoolIris, you get some neat transition effects. I used it on a few slides- as shown in the video below, not sure if it comes through as an effect (or a gimmick):
  cool iris trick

A few other notes on my mad methods- I do everything to avoid the inevitable Sucky Hotel Internet. So I run my presentation in a web browser, but running locally from Apache running on my MacBookPro. That makes it run a little faster. IN addition, because of the awkward pauses while waiting for web sites to load– all of the external sites I planned to use I had pre-loaded as tabs in my browser, so all I needed to do was to minimize the CoolIris interface, and flip to the right tab.

So that was 50+ Web 2.0 Ways to Tell a Story, Hawaiian Style (pineapple and Canadian bacon??).

Book ‘em, Dominoe.

Related posts:

1. 50(+) Web 2.0 Ways to Tell a Story (or 50 ways to drive myself nuts)
2. Lend a Hand to 50 Web 2.0 Ways to Tell a Story
3. 50 Web 2.0 Ways To Tell a Story

I’ve been saying that annotating maps is one of the most under-used edtech tools, given the wonderful capabilities one can do (for free) in Google MyMaps– Gmaps are more than finding driving locations to the nearest sushi bar. The fact that you can mark up anywhere in the world with information you pin on a map, is (to me) astounding, but I’m kind of a map nerd.

I’ve done a number of these maps for various reasons, but don’t always go back to them. But woah, my not so serious maps of places where people get Starbucks staff to say the word “large” (rather than foo foo ‘venti’) has like 18,000 views! That’s insane.

Open public maps are fine for projects and such, but it means that people have license to remove your description (I saw one conference map where someone placed the content they wanted in the map bubble inside my map description), and heck, look at the Starbucks map again; Jay Cross seems to have spammed it with a self promoting pin. Or he was confused. At least we know where he lives.

My new quest for the summer (at least) is reclaiming (some of) my weekend time, which has been lately filling with that gray boundary zone where work fuzzes out to the tech stuff I do on my own. So I am making more time for the offline activities, like today’s trip up to a new lake south of Flagstaff where I spent a good 2 hours paddling around in my kayak (well some of that time was sitting under a shade tree enjoying a cold beer).

But my tech genes don’t shut off completely, so I have my flickr photos posted, and tonight I was interested in starting a map with the lakes I have explored, going even back to my first dip in October 2007 when Westley Field took my paddling in the Sydney Harbour. So it did not take too much time to assemble my kayak map: I used the thumbnail size images of my flickr photos inside each pin.

View Alan’s Kayak Spots in a larger map

I still have some echoes of the excitement when I watched the Google Wave demo video on the brief but when they were co-browsing in real time, from different machines, a Google map. This still is one missing piece of maps, making them a shared social media experience.

So whats your take on maps? Where do you see people doing interesting things with them? Pinning static info on a map is obvious, but what about edgier things? I’ve been trying to suggest doing storytelling in GMap. What about a game? ARG? a treasure hunt? a puzzle? a math problem?

What’s on your map?

Related posts:

1. Liveplasma Pop Culture Mapping
2. 5th Year, Still Flash Mapping With IndyJunior
3. Silly Map / 13000 Views

modified from an original January 1935 issue found at the archive from Galactic Central

Amazing Stories of Openness
While the Open Education movement focuses on institutional issues, a large ocean exists of powerful individual accomplishments simply from tapping into content that is open for sharing and re-use. As colorful as old covers of “Amazing Stories” magazine, this presentation shares moving, personal stories that would not have been previously possible, enabled by open licensed materials and personal networks. Beyond my own tales, others have been culled from the net, and I ask you to share your own.

While open courseware is important, there is much more that happens to us as individuals as we break old conventions and actually freely share our content online.

I want to help promote the concept of wide open sharing by highlighting examples of Amazing Stories of Openness– things that people have gained from that were initiated from putting something they made, wrote into the open space of the web, stories of things that would not have ever happened without this space.

What the heck am I talking about? My own examples include ones outlined in Only on the Web:

• An HTML tutorial I shared in the mid 1990s was voluntarily translated into Icelandic by a teacher in Isafudor, later leading to be being invited to Reykjavik to run a workshop for teachers.
• A German rock band named “The Sea Level” found an old photo in my web site of the sea level sign in Death Valley– they used it for the cover of their CD and I got a copy of it!
• During a workshop in Tasmania, Australia, I was telling the audience about the amazing thing on flickr where I had posted photos of flowers labeled “Unknown flower” and people on their own found the photo and helped identify it. I chose one at random, and the person who had commented on my photo was sitting in the room!

This is the Tom Sawyer Fence Painting School of building presentations! I’m looking for your stories to tell to an audience at the August 2009 Open Ed Conference in Vancouver. If you complete the google form below (or find it directly at http://bit.ly/amazingstories) I’ll respond ASAP and hopefully we can set up a way for you to share your story (if not I have to build a presentation around just my own stories, yecchh).

How about it? It does not have to be super amazing, it might just be a colleague you discovered via open content, or a project that happened because of commons interests, or maybe something even more amazing.

Pixton Version of this Call For Stories

Thanks!

Related posts:

1. Video Call (two strikes already) for Amazing Stories
2. Unknown Flowers and The Most Amazing Story of Web Serendipity
3. MovableType Search: Seeking, Finding and Editing Old Posts