CogBlogged Tagged ‘small pieces’

A few weeks ago I was audio interviewed via Skype by Teemu Arina, a 1 hour plus session between me in Arizona and Teemu in Finland that was remarkably clear, had no dropouts. In an almost heroic effort, Teemu edited this to a pod/webcast, painstakingly removing my frequent “umms” as well as abstracting my free form meanders to a coherent set of possible ed tech futures. Thjis is now posted on a new site FLOSSE (Free/Libre and Open Source SoftwarE) which is a “posse” FLOSSE Posse is a group blog consisting of members of Free and Open Source Software Association (VOPE) from Finland. We will carry out reportage of FLOSS and Open Content in Education. The interview is now available at: http://flosse.dicole.org/?item=future-of-floss-in-education-interview-with-alan-levine or the direct audio: http://flosse.dicole.org/media/podcasts/Flosse_posse-Alan_Levine_20050124.mp3 Considered the list of heavy hitters to come in the next interviews, I am humbled and honored to be the first one posted. [...]

Interesting- fac.etio.us is a rip, mix, and refeed of del.icio.us. Found by way of John the Blog (a.k.a David Weinberger), fac.etio.us is a product of Sideran Software (“navigation for the digital universe”), a maker of corporate tools that offer: …intelligent search and retrieval applications lead you easily through oceans of uncharted corporate data to the relevant documents, products, and web pages that you need to find…. Our customers have slashed the time wasted by traditional text-based search methods, dramatically improving the quality and timeliness of their decisions. Seamark integrates gracefully with your existing information infrastructure, providing the results you want, when you want them. Our facet-based navigation explores the content using intuitive categories and keywords that match the way you think about your business. Navigation is so intuitive that new users can achieve superior results without any formal training. You likely do not see news of fac.etio.us on the Siderean [...]

Among the chaff of email spam are a few gems. Here is one from Ian in Spain who has figured out how to leverage RSS, blogs, and Feed2JS to generate a dynamic site: Hi Your rss2js service is first class. I love the code generator and the service itself – what a great job! I have a web site ‘

Woah, nellie! I had no idea when I clicked a link that said, “do not, I REPEAT, do not go here” (the old teacher reports read “Alan does not listen well to instructions”) that I’d find this wildly fantastic flickr graph tool: Flickr Graph is an application that explores the social relationships inside flickr.com. It makes use of the classic attraction-repulsion algorithm for graphs. Basically it lets you visualize and generate a dynamic social network the friends and friends of fiends and the friends of friends of friends as defined in flickr. Each node you click on, moves to the center and blossoms with the network for that person. Whichever node is in the center has a link to “view pics” or to load their flickr page So starting with Will’s network I re-organize to put mine in the network…. Now I must admit I’ve not spent much time going [...]

From suggestions, I’ve added two more sites to the web site submission multi tool, what was once blogged the DeliciousFurlBagConnotea Marklet Maker is now… DeliciousFurlBagConnoteaFrassleSiteULike Marklet Maker– having added posting tools for CiteULike and Frassle. Check it out, your mileage may vary given my tendency for programming typos: http://cogdogblog.com/alan/marklet_maker.php

As a geek happens a lot- I get curious and start poking around on the net, peeking at web page source code. Tonight, I was checking out the NOAA weather forecast for near our cabin and there was a little note near the top: New! Cell Phone (wap) URL: www.srh.noaa.gov/wml Now I have a stone age cell phone with no hope of being WAP capable (Wireless Application Protocol) but vaguely recollect how the limited display capabilities require web content in WML form (Wireless Markup Language). Well, see more on the WAP/WML acronym soup from W3Schools. You can get at info pretty quickly through WAP since it is designed to be just data, structured, and lightweight (the NOAA urls load s-l-o-w on the 28 bps modem speed up here). So here is what I dug up….

The new Journal Of the Hyperlinked Organization (JOHO) metaphorically paints folksomony and controlled vocabularies as “trees vs leaves”: Folksonomies are different in important ways from top-down, hierarchical taxonomies — the shape we’ve assumed knowledge itself takes. The old way gets some experts together who create a nested tree of concepts into which everything in a particular domain can be slotted. Think of the Dewey Decimal System. Think of the Tree of Life. The new way invites users of information to add a word or three to the objects they want to find again. The old way provides the vocabulary we are to use. The new way lets us use our own words. The old way puts the control of the classification system in that hands of the owners of information classifying it. The new way gives control to the users of information. The old way creates a tree. The new [...]

For the last year or more I have been blabbering about the “small pieces of technology loosely joined”, so it was extremely overdue that I actually read the book I pilfered the phrase from. So thanks to a holiday gift card from Borders (which is really just a portal to Amazon) just fresh off the Amazon.com truck comes my own personal copy of David Weinberger’s

I’ve been deploying my day time discoveries some web design work I do outside the Maricopa gig… most recently wrapping some of the Small Technologies Loosely Joined for the Eye Dog Foundation. This is a local organization that raises and trains German Shepherds as guide dogs for the blind, providing them at no cost. This has been a donation-ware project, and has gone on and off for more than a year– the Eye Dog folks are not techies, and getting content has been, well tough at times. My plans for the site was to architect it in a modular fashion with an ultimate goal of having a basic admin system for the staff to be able to update the content via web forms. A number of content areas are loaded with randomly chosen “content-lets” such as the background image sin the footer and the “Friends of the Foundation” blurbs in [...]

Holy Flickr! I just blindly stmbled into yet another wildly frenetic flickr functionality. I think it was Roland’s feed that led me here, but flickr is being used, along with its note features, to create a collaborative map of Vancouver– a series of closer and father up images of the city based on ?? Keyhole. Start by going to the group page for vancouver aerial tagging: Here’s collaborative aerial map of vancouver, which i made so that i could geolocate some images i took when i visited in may. by clicking on the areas under the tacks you can ‘zoom’ in. then you can add notes to those images with the text format [photo]flickrimageID[/photo] and your images will appear whenever someone clicks “expose photography locations” it is a bit awkward interface wise but it is really a lot of fun. because i’ve opened up the images so that anyone can [...]