It’s been about 24 hours I’ve been back from my week in London (and it took another 24 hours to do all the travel stops to do that). I have a dog blog back load of stuff to post, but I seem to be having trouble with the bulldozer I hired to clean off my work plate.

So here it is in little dribs and drabs. At the Slug and Lettuce meetup organized by @Gia, I was fortunate to talk to Leon Cych (@eyebeam) who does some fascinating work in gaming and education. He showed a nifty little iPhone app that I like especially for its simplicity.

It is called the Random Activity Generator (or RAG). It sets up everything in a DO – AS structure…

The “DO” is a topic or concept that a person might be asked to demonstrate as an activity. The “AS” is the way in which a person must try to present it. So you simply shake the iPhone, and you get an assignment like:

“Do the twelve times table as a rhyming couplet”

The green arrow offers a web link to more information on either side of the “Do/As” line- links to WikiPedia for reference or YouTube videos to demonstrate a process.

Maybe that would go…

Twelve times one is an easy one on the shelf
It’s 12 Since anything times one is itself.

If you do twelve times two it’s a simple chore
As doing this one gets you twenty four

Or another shake gets you…

I will leave this one as an exercise to the reader ;-)

Technically its a really simple app. But I like it because

• it leads to being creative.
• It is a technology tool that sets up an activity that is not done in technology. The app gives you something to do, but it is not done in the app. So you might have to act it out in front of a group, or maybe you would build the act in say a pecha kucha form, or something else.
• It is inherently social- you would do the activity in front of other people.
• The format lends itself to further research- if you do not fully know the “do” or the “act” (I had to look up rhyming couplet to be sure), it calls for further inquiry.

It’s a great recipe. The web site has a great set of video examples of how people have “done the RAG” http://theragis.us/

But take it on a simple level- you carry a device around which can sense where you are, and using foursquare (or its variants) you can “mark” your locations, see others that have been there. I put aside my criticism to last month as we learned from Beth Kanter how some museums were putting it to use (or see this strategy by a NY theater group and more ideas for museums), especially again, the notion of “listening” in social media.

So check this out- in two steps you can generate a google map of your foursquaring.

I had to try.

It works (click for larger view or see it in Google maps)

What it places in a bubble is simple- the name of the place and whatever notes you added. One might bend this as a field mapping project- check in diferent locations in a city, and comment on the architecture? Create a map-based story? I don’t know. I could save this as a MyMap and add more content to it (e.g. edit the bubbles with my photos? notes? field measurements?)

I see foursquare as used still a bit silly. It’s bad you can check into a place when you are not really in the vicinity (I did a back check in from Phoenix to a place I was on a previous trip). And now that you can check in anywhere, at airports you see locations like “Gate 39″, “Gate 38″, “In the Air”. I think I am mayor of a baggage claim, and I even joked about trying to be a mayor of a key place at the Phoenix Airport (I took some fictional liberty- Joe B is not mayor of a stall) (Neither am I) (But there is a Joe who is mayor of Ocotillo Sun, the bar in terminal 2).

This is the pitfall of judging an app, a tool, of the way you see it being used, and not looking a bit broader at the way it is not being used.

Look at what foursquare is offering for feeds – your history as RSS (subscribe to updates), KML (do stuff on maps), and ICS (do stuff with calendars):

The foursquare feeds system allows you to subscribe to RSS, KML and iCal feeds of your data. The feeds platform is still in development and is subject to change at any time (sorry!).

We’ve made the feeds available (using private token URLs) to make it easy for you to construct simple frontends like WordPress plugins and Dashboard widgets without having to use our regular API.

That smells of potential there.

And slap my palm on my head- I had no idea you could just past a KML feed into the search box of google maps and generate a map like this. Hmmmm. Hmmmmmmmmm. Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm.

I had liked over the last year how they updated their ATMs to scan checks for deposits negating the need for deposit slips and envelopes. This is one more step.

I already had the Chase app, and sure enough it is in there– well I did have to generate a new security code (shows you how much I use the app)…

So it looks like you have to do photos of the front and back of the check, and there are limits to the service (no more than $1000 per deposit or $3000 per week).

For you urbanites who have a bank branch for every Starbucks it may not be a big deal, but I am more than 20 miles from a branch, and each time I get a travel expense or other check in the mail, it means a drive into town. Not anymore.

And yes, I can hear all of the weeping and moaning about security. Sure its more secure to shove a piece of paper representing money into a metal box, there is no way that ATMs can be burgled, eh?

I’m game to try,. If anyone wants to mail me $100 I’ll let you know if it works ;-)

It’s been a while since I did some WordPress hacking, and today I think it showed. Like a good bone I could not let go of a niggling little problem, and then after going around in circles, I found an obvious way that was much more simpler than where I was headed.

But there are things even learned in a few trips around the roundabout.

Here’s where I drove around in circles today… for a while, I have been publishing web versions of the NMC Horizon Reports in CommentPress format at http://wp.nmc.org — this is very useful for publications since it allows comments to be attached to individual paragraphs, so they are tied at a more micro level to the content. (Yeah they are in the old CommentPress mode, I know I should be using the newer digress.it and am ready to publish the new one there this week).

Since Mobiles have been part of the Horizon Reports since like 1776, and there is the nifty WPtouch plugin that elegantly makes WordPress sites display cleanly on not just iPhones, but other mobile platforms (my first play was last year and I have rolled into most of my WordPress sites).

So I decided to play a few minutes (hah) with the 2010 Horizon Report web version

cc licensed flickr photo shared by Bob.Fornal

And here was my first wrong turn in over thinking it.

You see, CommentPress really turns the regular blog publishing model a bit inside out. What I had been stuck on is that when CommentPress publishes its list of “chapters” or “sections”, each essentially a blog post, they end up being listed in the order they were created (preface, than chapter 1, then chapter 2….)- in fact the reverse of a regular blog where posts are listed in reverse chronology.

So I felt I needed a way to manipulate the WordPress Loop, the magical hub of WP. The mythical Loop.

I found where the content is formatted in WPtouch, inside the plugin folder is a themes folder and then a default folder where there are the theme files used to format when the content is detected on a mobile. A lot of it is stuff you should never deal with, but there is your basic Loop in action:

if (have_posts()) : while (have_posts()) : the_post();

Even knowing PHP it is not exactly clear what happens, but before any template loads, the basic WordPress runs a WP_Query call (the thing that finds stuff in your database) in the basic mode- gets stuff in reverse chronological order. If it is the front page, then it is recent posts; if it is a category page, same, but only for blog posts in that category, etc.

It says something like:

“Hey, do I have any posts (things)?”

“If so, cool! Then lets walk through them one at a time and do something to them.”

“For the current one I am looking at, lets do….”

With a bit of wandering around the codex getting waylaid by get_posts() and the full wp_query() info, I found a quite simple way to change way stuff is fetched into the loop.

First of all, I create a new wp_query() to replace the standard run through the database:

$my_query = new WP_Query('order=ASC&posts_per_page=-1&orderby=date');

I am now telling it to fetch things differently- first off all to return all the posts (posts_per_page=-1) so I get all of the posts for a table of contents default view, and most importantly, list them in order of date ascending (oldest first).

Then I simply replace the standard The Loop with this similar code:

 if ($my_query) : while ($my_query->have_posts()) : $my_query->the_post();

The Homer doh! moment came when I was setting up the WPtouch settings- you have to indicate on the mobile what should act as the “home” view:

You see, in running CommentPress, you do not use a standard blog index page for the default.home view- it uses the About Page. So my clever blog re-ordering was for naught. In the iPhone, the Wptouch version presented the About Page, but because CommentPress uses a custom template, the navigation links to the other section (and the sidebars) never show up.

But I did notice that the category view I use for all posts did display in reverse reverse chronological order, so I thought about using http://wp.nmc.org/horizon2010/category/chapters/ as a table of contents (on the web you only get 5 posts, but with my custom loop replacement, I got a listing of all posts (since this is my default category).

So I came up with a new idea- make a new WordPress page, call it Table of Contents, have it be a landing page for the WPtouch settings, that had a link to the Category Page Acting Like a Table of Contents — and it sort of worked.

But it seemed like extra clicks to get there.

cc licensed flickr photo shared by chrisdlugosz

And then I came completely around the circle, almost. All my theme hacking was un-necessary. I reverted the WPtouch default template to what it came with.

Rather then trying to get fancy to have WordPress automatically generate something to act like a table of contents (by messing with the blog post order) I went more static. These sites dont add new posts once they are done- they are just sections fo a paper- so the flash of insight was just to copy the HTML for the left side listing of chapters on the web version, pop that into my stub Table of Contents page.

And now, you can see the final version by using your mobile to go to http://wp.nmc.org/horizon2010

This page is never used or linked on the CommentPress web version, but it does become the “home” page on the iPhone version:

and scrolling down below the pretty cover photo, you get a clean looking Table of Contents:

And from there a clean mobile version of one of the chapters (there are link buttons at the bottom to get to the next article, plus Home buttons to return to the index.

Of course, in the phone, there is no equivalent of the CommentPress comments on each paragraph, though you can post a comment on the entire text in the chapter, and see all comments added.

It’s not bad, and what I like is having a mobiel version of these documents without having to create all new content, this is generated by what I do already to publish them online. No special single platform app is needed either.

I’ll be rolling this into all of the previous versions of Horizon Reports (six on the site) plus maybe another 8 CommentPress papers there as well. Just because I can.

And once I work tomorrow with digress.it, I will be curious to see how it flows into the WPtouch rendering on a mobile.

And that was my not so little bit of tail chasing today….

cc licensed flickr photo shared by M.H.ick9s

I’ve been cruising through a techno funk, a semi-periodic time when I am just finding the motivation gas tank leaning towards “E” and have refrained from blogging about not blogging. And I am not doing that here. After the trip to Doha, I have a half baked, half written rant on being tired of conferences (that one will be left on the vine, it is old territory).

But sometimes, something new just comes along to revive the interest- I’m not sure if this is it, but this morning I caught WordPress Matt’s announcement of Post and Read via Twitter API — and hinting at how blogging is seeing a companion burst by riding the twitter wave (not the google one):

The other day I talked about micro-blogging and mega-blogging and shared my view that new forms of social media, including micro-blogging, are complementary to blogging. We’ve seen ongoing growth at WordPress.com as people started using Twitter, and we expect that to continue.

So what this new API allows is a way to subscribe to content — via a twitter client– from WordPress.com blogs — it’s been a long time since I;ve been in their dashboard; they have ways to subscribe to blogs directly or via tags to content from WordPress.com blog stuff. And.. you can use the same client to create a post from a twitter client. In Matt’s post, he tells you how to set up Tweetie 2 on an iPhone to do this.

Now this hardly seemed really earth shattering world changing etc, but sometimes, I am just curious to see how it works. So I set up an account in Tweetie for my WordPress.com account, and saw it pull in the posts from my old CogDogRoo blog there (not much else as I am not subscribed to anything).

That was easy. I had to go to my WordPress.com profile, and select which blog I wanted to post to via twitter:

And then I was able to post to a WP.com blog from Tweetie 2:

which ended up, as advertised, on my CogDogLab blog http://cogdoglab.wordpress.com/2009/12/14/okay-i-am-trying-the-new-twitter-api-th/

and because I forgot I did it, went back out to my regular twitter account because I had enabled that in WordPress.com

It seemed weird at first that there was no link to this post, but why? There is nothing else more on the blog then in the tweet.

So I don’t know here what practical application this has, but it now resides as a potential capability hanging out in the internet wind. One could set up easily with a P2 like theme, a microblogging looking site on WordPress.com, perhaps providing a place to hang updates in a place that looks like twitter but is actually not. I cant see blogging by twitter being something I would be doing… but this does seem like an interesting blurring between things we see as distinctly different (blog platforms and twitter).

There is something to what Matt write suggesting about the power of APIs being able to move data between services:

APIs are Biz Dev 2.0, as Caterina Fake put it, our ability to connect Tweetie 2 to WordPress.com proves this out. We didn’t have to talk to Loren Brichter because he built custom API support into Tweetie 2 — thanks Loren! (As an aside, I’d love to see custom API support added to TweetDeck and Seesmic, my two favorite desktop Twitter clients.)

This is a very subtle point- the developer of the Tweetie 2 app had not built this functionality into his software, but left a door for other people to be able to by adding the capability of extensible APIs. This is getting to be familiar but its also a radical way of building things from the way ti was done before the read/write web age.

No sign yet if this will be rolled into the self hosted wordpress code.

Just interesting.

As described there,

Whilst making Shoot The Summer I’ve been thinking a lot about the capabilities of the mobile in film making and story telling. I Twittered my thoughts at the Cambridge Folk Festival then converted it to audio using my Mac’s text to audio recognition software. I then dropped it over clips filmed on my mobile phone. The results are quite interesting.

It’s really not that complex a task, and to me, would make for an interesting assignment for a film/media class. More details at Telling Stories with Twitter.

Add to the interesting pile, Shoot the Summer:

‘Shoot The Summer’ is a film documenting a summer of festivals shot entirely on mobile phones. The film was shot by our DJs, our artists and most importantly our audience. The film covers a diverse selection of events including Cambridge Folk Festival, Summer Sundae, London Mela, Notting Hill Carnival, Creamfields, Bestival and Proms in the Park, to name a few.

But last night… I found an app that is, to me, explosive, in terms of opening potential for what a portable, networked, web connected media acquisition device can do. I am projecting the children of so-called “digital natives”, the ones that will make those natives seem foreign, will look back at our use of keyboard driven computers the same way I might look at a Victrola or a telegraph machine.

So, first a tip of the blog hat, a linktribution to David Warlick for sharing in his post, an iPhone app called SnapTell. It is a visual parallel of one of the other most amazing iApps, Shazam, which lets you hold the phone to an audio source, and it uses audio recognition to sample and identify the song and return information about the song back to your handheld.

SnapTell allows you to use the camera in the iPhone to take the picture of a book, CD< or DVD cover, and it uses image recognition to match it to a database, and return al of the relevant information from Amazon.com. SnapTell Explorer for the iPhone is described on their blog.

This free download, powered by SnapTell’s Snap.Send.Get image recognition technology, gives camera phone users instant information on virtually any book, movie DVD, video game or music CD.

We all know you can’t judge a book by its cover, and the same goes for films, music, and games. But fret not, because SnapTell’s new Mobile Movie Explorer can help make sure that you never have buyer’s remorse again — just snap the picture, send it to SnapTell, and you’ll get comprehensive information and reviews for the product you’re interested in right on your iPhone.

I’ve been playing a little with the QRCode readers like NeoReader on the iPhone, especially in Japan, where there where QR codes in the newspaper, on stores, on public signs, but its a challenge because you have to get a square on framed shot, it’s hard to get a good photos of the small ones. It takes too much effort.

So I gave SnapTell a quick test last night, taking a picture of a paperback that has been traveling with me, so its front page is curled and torn, and I took this photo under room light, what I would call non-optimal photo conditions- my photo I took with the app looked like:

So I took the image in the SnapTell app, clicked “use photo” and within 5 seconds it correctly identified it:

100% correct as Anything for Billy by Larry McMurtry. More than linking to Amazon, it ferrets a relevant link in Wikipedia to the author plus a link to a preset Google search (and Yahoo) for more information.

Now the SnapTell site reads with a lot of commercial-speak:

Founded in 2006, SnapTell is revolutionizing the way consumers and marketers connect. Using an everyday camera phone and SnapTell’s innovative image recognition technology, users can easily and instantly access requested information. Marketers can effortlessly create high-impact campaigns using existing collateral and can alter their messaging on the fly in response to SnapTell-provided actionable metrics.

SnapTell provides a highly customizable and integrated mobile marketing solution. With this Snap.Send.Get™ solution, marketers can deploy mobile marketing campaigns quickly and effectively. The SnapTell solution enables consumers to easily access marketing content and information on the go, driving brand awareness, conversion, loyalty and revenues. It is an end-to-end solution that gives marketers the ability to reach consumers and create a brand relationship with them – not just impressions..

blah blah. But under the Technology section it gets more interesting:

One of SnapTell’s patent pending proprietary innovations is a highly accurate and robust algorithm for image matching that we call ASG. Image matching is the problem of efficiently matching a query camera phone image against a database of images. Our technology offers unprecedented scale in detecting a matching image in a large database of images. Scaling of image matching is achieved using patent pending indexing techniques to organize all the features in any of a database of images for the purpose of efficient lookup. Our system also makes innovative use of distributed computing to achieve enormous scale.

Our technology works effectively on photos taken with almost all camera phones in the world wide market, including phones on the lower end of the market that have VGA cameras or relatively low resolution (640×480) cameras. Also, our matching server can handle photos taken in real life conditions that have a lot of issues including lighting artifacts, focus blur, motion blur, perspective distortion and incomplete overlap with the database image. Our technology works in a wide variety of real life scenarios including those of consumers taking photos of magazine print ads, outdoor billboards, posters, product packaging, branded cans, bottles and logos.

Another novel aspect of our technology is a patent pending innovation to automatically extract text embedded in camera phone images with unprecedented accuracy and use the extracted text to drive search. Text extraction is useful in scenarios in which the target image is not already registered in the database.

This is highly relevant for a new project we are now involved with at NMC, to develop the next iteration of the software alread in place at the Steve Project, for allowing museum visitors to tag artwork. The way it is done now is that tagging is done via images of art in a web browser. Part of the new project is developing mobile apps where people could tag art while at the museum– in fact, at a meeting last week, we sky dreamed af an app where we could use the camera in a mobile device to snap a photo of the art work, which could then be identified via image recognition in a database, so the web app could return to the mobile device a tagging interface to the now identified art work.

This is now not a dream- SnapTell does exactly this.

I am sure there are more things one can do, but consider the power of a mobile devices camera and network connection to identify or collect information from the field- be it museums, fossils, plants, exotic frogs– and identify it visually via a photo (like SnapTell) or even audio (like Shazam) by sound — e.g. bird identification by call?? And this is not even including the capabilities you get by connecting now media, information, and geolocation afforded by auto mapping via GPS.

This is finally getting close to the long promise of mobile learning technologies. I am again thinking of a conversation I had in Japan with a group of undergraduate students at Osaka Gakuin University when I asked them about the kinds fo technology they used most often for play, social use, or anything.

None of them mentioned a computer or a lap-top. They don’t have/own/use one because of the capabilities of phones (and networks, 3G is old news) in Japan. The computer is a foreign device to this group of young people, leapfrogging us, the keyboard generation, as they are technologically connected people– without a computer (this is ignoring what they will do when they get to a workplace that has those old machines).

I am excited about the magic of mobile technology as, if they way I peek into the foggy curtain of the future, portable networked devices make the connectivity, the information seeking, gathering more transparent. Snap a photo of something and identify it- magic. Put a mobile device near an audio source and identify it- magic.

Magic, as if magic, as if magic– the tag line on my iPhone email is- “Emailed as if Magic from my iPhone”

Chances are, you carry a cell phone with you everywhere you go. And more than likely, that cell phone has a camera. Qipit turns this handy device into a portable scanner, copier and fax machine, and the user-friendly Qipit service also works with your digital camera at home or the office.

The patented image-processing science behind Qipit is complicated, but the concept is simple: use Qipit to capture and share anything written or printed. Whereever you’re at. Whenever you need it.

I just quickly set up an account, and used my iPhone to take picture of a sketch diagram I have for some plans to redo the taxonomy of our NMC drupal site – which has its own public URL
https://www.qipit.com/public/cogdog/2008_08_26_scan_01

Now I don’t often sketch things, but with it should not take much to think of some great ways to use this free service. More and more, it seems less important to lug a laptop, when I have a powerful machine as a phone.

And in the spirit of good embed-ness, you can put any of this in a web page. So before I do this, my own backl story. I have always been years behind in the latest phone tech. I use mine mainly for… calls, plus some photo/upload to flickr and a few posts to twitter. I am definitely a phone lagger.

But believe me, after trying an iphone in the Apple Store last August in Chicago, the tempation has been hard to ignore. You want one, admit it. I want one, I admit it.

So with some shame I mus admit that when offered to get a work paid iphone… I actually turned it down (for now). Why? Well, my previous one just died, and to get something new, I got sucked into the scam US providers do (lock us in) to a new 2 year contract for a new Razr phone (which I like, BTW). But I would have coughed up the surrender fee in a heartbeat if it were not for…. AT&T.

As a sole provider, you have no choice but cover your distaste and smile when you sign on their dotted line. But because I spend a lot of time in the Rim country north of Phoenix, access is key. And AT&T’s coverage sucks royally up there. The best signal we can get is by going outside to the end of the driveway and leaning to the south east. For a bar or two. My phone from Alltel comes in with a strong signal anywhere in town up there. And my new wireless mobile card from Alltel provides back up internet.

So I am opting to wait for the iPhone. Some to see if the choices for provider change or if AT&T actually does something to boost their signals. Heck, I know where on top of the rim the towers are. I can see them line of sight from my house. But I also think it might be wise to wait for a next-er version, one that may be 3G?

So until then, for my, TryPhone provides my own iPhone to play with and lust over.