CogBlogged Tagged ‘small pieces’

It’s the day before I board the Big Old Jet Airliner to the NMC Summer Conference and I am piling on the Web 2.0 Tagging goodness, or zaniness. This recap is as much to document as to thanks those I lean on. Last year, at the 2006 Summer conference in Cleveland, being my first one in the fold of NMC employment, I rolled out a Tag This Conference page, mixing up del.icio.us, flickr, and hopefully technorati content all tagged with nmc2006, the page doing so with some help from a local version of feed2js. Repeated this tagging for the 2006 Regional Conference in San Antonio. So without too much extension, the Web 1.0ish page is up for next week’s conference spiffed up a bit by bringing it also up as a Tumblog, which presents the feeds from the same 3 sources a bit more stylishly. Okay, that is good, but…

Long before “Web 2.0″, “social software”, the big web buzzword was “portals”– A portal, or enterprise information portal (EIP), is a Web site that integrates an organization’s knowledge base and all related applications into a single user-customizable environment. This environment acts as a one-stop shop, or “gateway,” for users’ information and system needs. So it was with a bit of cynicism when a GSFSE (Google Search For Something Else) landed me on Zimbio a home of “portals” or “community sites about specific topics”. But these are not your Grandpa’s Enterprise Portals of say… 4 years ago; these are sites fueled by RSS, aggregation, etc… maybe even (can I really write this?)… “Portals 2.0″ Gasp. From a quick glance, it looks like these Zimbio sites offer special interest groups some tools to build a community site that is able to pull content from RSS sources, photos from image sites like flickr, [...]

Perhaps we should be speaking about things moving “at the speed of the web”…. go away from a web based tool/service for a week or more, and you may have missed 3 new versions or 40 new features. No I am not complaining (I like the chaos), just observing from a floating raft in the river web. A few barks back, I was trying to find a way to incorporate data form a Google calender into a wordpress powered site. Editing the calendar was slick in the Google Calendar interface, but sipping out content… well I tried some WordPress Plugins (mixed results, difficult to control output, or to get events in the right order); tried some AJAX code but later found this was yielding RSS telling me the calendar changes, not the date order– and lastly, using an iCal plugin. This effort is for NMC’s Second Life Campus site — [...]

While there are at least 20 or more different social bookmark tools out there, I am pretty much committed and hooked on del.icio.us. It has that no frills but highly functional interface, but mainly because it has so many subtle features that are easy to overlook, even if you have been a regular user. It is subtly powerful, in a way that many people do not see. So I cam going to cover three “next level” things you can do in del.icio.us, two of which I had not even checked out before last week. I am sure there are more treasures in there, and remember that just about everything… no make that everything displayed in del.icio.us has an associated RSS feed.

flickr foto Cactifittiavailable on flickr This is a photo from last year’s trip to Hawaii, but someone found another one from this same place and invited me to share it in a flickr pool devoted to grafitti on plants (who woulda thunk?). This is near the top of Makapu’u point on Oahu. I usually wax about the beauty of the web providing a nice for every interest you can and cannot imagine. The twist that social software like flickr provides is an incredible enabler for this process, and for ways for both the niches to discover new niche-dewellers. An event that has happened twice recently has brought this to my attention. In my fascination for macro shots of flowers, I had popped up a shot of a bouganvillea in my year, it looked a bit like a human face. Ina matter of days, a comment popped in there, flattering me [...]

Cocomment is an interesting web technology that does some neat things but perhaps is not so wide it used to reach a next level of progress. It acts as a service of sorts, to tackle the age old (or 3 year old) problem of not knowing what happens to the “conversations” you leave as comments distributed on other blogs. It aims to register your commenting in a way that allows you to track it. On first iteration, it required you to click a JavaScript bookmark tool for every new comment you posted. ( forgot to do this 9 out of 10 times. Then I got clued into a Firefox Greasemonkey script that automated it. I worked well for a few weeks, then Cocomment changed and the script got more wonky. Then following a clue from Amy G, I found coComment has developed its own Firefox extension that sits in the [...]

I’ve been eyeballing an ever increasing amount of web-based platforms for bringing together content (or microcontent, or nanocontent) from multiple sources, the echo again of Small Technologies (Pieces) Loosely Joined (note- if the content there is replaces by a wiki spam link, just wait until the bot resets the mess. Brian- you may want to lock this wiki??). Previously mentioning SuprGlu and how I was somewhat Hooked On Glu. What the Glu does is allow you to create a public page that aggregates content you select from multiple sources (as long as the sources provide RSS feeds) into one nicely presented web page view. the “tools” for doing this are wonderfully simple, and it took literally minutes for me to create my first Glu’d site. This is pretty much a tool for creating public views of aggregated content, what here I am calling “Outward” Aggregating. Bloglines sort of straddles this [...]

The newest mind-blowing add on for del.icio.us users must be Revealacious billed as “revealing the way you use del.icio.us”: Revealicious is a set of graphic visualisations for your del.icio.us account that allow you to browse, search and select tags, as well as viewing posts matching them. * SpaceNav (demo), which allows you to explore the structure of your tags in a rather recreative manner. * TagsCloud (demo), which is an interactive and enhanced version of the tagscloud available in del.icio.us * Grouper (demo), which is an experimental interface for grouping and working with tags. More or less, you plug in your del.icio.us account details, and this site provides some interesting graphic tools to “reveal” relationships in your tagging methodology (or lack thereof?). On a quick toor, SpaceNav, provides an interactive view of how your tags are inter-related, so starting with my tag for “blogging” Rollovers on the small dots in [...]

The kiwis have a great expression about being able to fix anything with some number 8 bailing wire, sort of the down under flavor of duct tape. I just spent about 90 minutes cobbling together what I hope to be a framework for supporting audio content across a number of our content sites. I’ve yet to join the merry gang of Podcasting Is The Greatest Thing Since ________, but I do so a value of adding more audio content to our site, capturing events, meetings, interviews etc. This will be a hasty and haphazard explanation of what I did, cause I really want to get home and have some dinner ;-) First of all, I will be capturing the audio on the cheap, plopping down a new iRiver iFP 799 MP3 recorded (1 Gb model with external line and input ports). It’s a love hate relationship -I love being able [...]

I’m still drowning in a flotsam of un-done tasks, but I was glad I shoved by a little bit of time to check our Leigh Blackall and Sean FitzGerald’s presentation for Cool Results: Engaging Clients in E-learning hosted by LearningTimes Australia. It’s well worth a look, or at least tossing a bookmark at and coming back to. I did not have time (cough) to listen to the full 2.5 hour recorded Elluminate session, but it’s there waiting. Titled “Knowledge Sharing with Distributed Networking Tools”, the content provided hits the ground on all good points: * Excellent collection of resources on social netowrking tools etc, your smorgasboard of small pieces loosely joined * The way presented is so appropriate- posted on a part of free hosted wikispaces site (I first learned about wikispaces from Leigh’s blog, and have put it to some use over the last year). Stack this up next [...]