I use Gmail extensively, got my CogDogness, as well as over the last few weeks, I have ditched the desktop email client and using the Gmail version of our NMC Google Apps email. By finding my oldest Gmail message, I’ve been using it since July 2005 (and have amassed pile that is 3% of the capacity)– yet a lesson of the web tech crazy pace is that there is always something new to learn. You never get to the end.

Since I’ve been Gmailing so long I have pretty much ignored the ticker tape of “web clips” or news/ad-like things that sit atop the inbox.

Until today.

I noticed a link to “edit” the web clips, which is a tab inside the settings, and likely has been there a long time (learn more about Gmail web clips…). Woah, neo, of course- those are all RSS! And… you can remove all the ones you dont want (i zapped them all)… and… drumroll- you can add your own RSS URLs!

For a test, I added feeds for comments to my blog and to my flickr account. Essentially, the web clips are turned into a mini feed mixer (although the docs say the clips are displayed randomly, not sequentially).

So now, instead of unwanted cruft from cookbooks, forbes, my gmail ticker has my own feed items atop my inbox:

I am not 100% sure how useful this is, but now in my email reading, I can get some notifcation using the clips I want, not theirs.

And that. my friends, is a good thing. Good web dog.

Blogging from iPod for the fun of it!

Thanks to a friend who slipped me a promo code to get a discount on my first order, I tipped the cow… er scale, and ordered my first set of cards:

The Moo tools are as easy as dipping Oreos- you give your flick credentials and you can then start selecting images from your photos, from your tags, sets, or just poking around. I rummaged around my hundreds of my photos flowers and dogs. You don’t have to select 100 pictures to make 100 cards (if you use less you get repeats). You can customize the info that appears on the back, including your flickr icon (yay) and either free text on the six lines of print, but can also have information auto inserted based on the image used (mine has a URL to the photo).

But what I liked most was the whole moo-ing experience. It was fun, and my interactions with the site and service came across like it had a personality. I mean, they have made something as drab and ordinary as ordering business cards exciting. Imagine if someone could do that with say, tax returns or plumbing repair. Maybe.

It starts right away from the moo site very prominent is “we like to print” – is that a human mission statement or what? And “We are a printing company where every one is different” – look at the layers and nuances of meaning here.

And going through the selection process is fun too. I had so much I went back to order note cards. Do you know when you order something online and get one of those boiler plate email confirmations? It’s as fun as reading an ingredients list on a box of noodles. My email after ordering was:

Hello Alan

I’m Little MOO – the bit of software that will be managing your order with us. I will shortly be sent to Big MOO, our print machine who will print it for you in the next few days. I’ll let you know when it’s done and on its way to you.

I love Little Moo. I smile.

My order arrived today in a generic white envelope from the U.K. (like 6 days after ordering) that wa so plain it took me a while to even know who it was from. The box:

contains a label letting me know the box is from recycled plastic and the paper used for cards is “sourced from sustainable forests”

And how can one really comprehend the sensation of having such individualized cards? Not with a monotonous repeating graphic, but each one different, each one something I “made”.

Perhaps to you, my quiet blog reader, this seems so obviously apparent. But how often do we have a rewarding, an energizing experience with a company? How often does it feel more like you are dealing with a person or a faceless entity? Moo has the personality part nailed, and I may not even care if it is contrived.

I am hooked.

I Love Moo.

Yay.

If anyone wants this experienc, email me directly or direct message me on twitter- I have one of those discount codes for 20% off your first card order.

And you may Love Moo Too.

Nothing special about the photo (except it had the word “drafting table” in it), just one of several thousand sitting in my bin.

I keep an RSS feed for my flickr comments so I know when someone writes something (so I can respond, or just so my ego can get a small stroke), and a day ago came this cryptic comment from a joe:allam:

Expect your views of this picture to go up drastically in the next few days.

Sure enough, when I went to check, it was up to 82, far above the normal views on my photos. And the number is climbing, notes joe:allam:

And now at 152 on July 2nd, 2008 12:50 GMT. Here is your reason enjoy.

The reason is my humble drafting table is playing a small role in a tutorial on the PSDTUTS site, Create a Realistic Blueprint Image From a 3D Object:

In amazing detailed, illustrated steps, Alvaro Guzman shows how to import a 3D model into PhotoShop, and manipulate the model data to generate a realistic looking blueprint image. He than shows how to make it look like a real piece of paper (with subtle shadows, folds, drapes) laid across my drafting table photo.

Now I have used PhotoShop for like 15 years (back to version 3.0), and realize, as always how, little I know, this is amazing techniques shared.

And now I am hooked on the PSDTUTS site, which is in its words,

PSDTUTS is a blog/photoshop site made to house and showcase some of the best Photoshop tutorials around. We publish tutorials that not only produce great graphics and effects, but explain in a friendly, approachable manner.

Photoshop is a fantastically powerful program and there are a million ways to do anything, we hope that reading PSDTUTS will help our readers learn a few tricks, techniques and tips that they might not have seen before and help them maximize their creative potential!

And once more, I get this adrenaline rush (woooooooooosh) from another exmaple of web serendipity that creates new connections, opens new resources, like new neurons forming and firing off.

Thanks for finding my photo and dressing it up! Up to 175 views and climbing.

As a hint- this pretty much was enabled because in my compulsive manner I title and add captions to all my photos that brought the photo up when someone searched on “drafting table”. Don’t expect much if you back up your camera like a dump truck to flickr and release a pile of ones with titles like DSCN2345.JPG – take the time to put some context there. I think in some circles people might call this “metadata” (I speed up this process using the iPhoto/Aperature flickr exporter, well worth the shareware).

But more so, just share your stuff. Its addictive.

Earlier this month he shared the link to the 50 Best Commercial Parodies which fed my nostalga as a teen growing up on SNL (in its first year, it was not even broadcast on Baltimore NBC’s station and I remember staying with the fuzzy signal from channel 4 in D.C.).

And today, he shared what I think is one of the most brilliant creative ideas in a while; maybe it is a negative mashup? Check our garfield minus garfield in which the cat has been erased from the strips, revealing a disturbing personality of Jon:

Who would have guessed that when you remove Garfield from the Garfield comic strips, the result is an even better comic about schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and the empty desperation of modern life? Friends, meet Jon Arbuckle. Let’s laugh and learn with him on a journey deep into the tortured mind of an isolated young everyman as he fights a losing battle against loneliness in a quiet American suburb.

Think about the sheer creativty (IMHO) of this- in making content, we tend to focus about adding, adding, piling on, and here is someone who creates by stripping away. I am sure there is a fancy art school word for this and it goes back to the 1300s, but hey, it is fresh to me.

But it gets better. If you were like me, the first thing you would guess is that Jim Davis Garfield artist or whatever megacorp that owns Garfield.would be sic-ing the lawyers on Dan Walsh, the garfield-garfield creator and piling him with cease and desists.

But no.

Davis likes the derivative work. In an article in the Washington Post, When the Cat’s Away, Neurosis Is on Display (gotta like a good title), a quote form Davis suggests he does not have the copyright fever…

One of Walsh’s occasional readers is Davis, who heard about the site a few months ago. The cartoonist calls the work “an inspired thing to do” and wishes to thank Walsh for enabling him to see another side of “Garfield.”

I love this stuff…

Steve made this quiz with MyStudiyo which who knows, may become the YouTube for multiple choice quizzes?

It offers you templates and easy tools to build a quiz, and your questions and feedbacks can include images and video media. I think there is also a feature where people can contribute more questions to your quiz (not that I ever had a test where I did not get enough questions!) which may have some interesting applications- a quiziki?

They are running a contest this month where if you create a quiz and embed it in your blog, you could win a top prize of one of those sexy little ASUS EEE computers as top prize or $50 Amazon.com credits. All you have to do is impress Steve Dembo and Sue Waters with your creativity in quizzing.

I’d like to see some folks that can create some quizzes that defy the ability to guess and succeed- when I was in school, one of the most useful things I learned (helping me move easily through standardized tests) was how to get answers right on multiple choice quizzes for things I knew nothing about; even on Steve’s quiz my guessing quotient got me at least 30% of the questions where I truly did not know the answer.

But there are places where multiple choice thingies are appropriate, and from a scan by, this tool looks like a great one for teachers. Go cook up a cool quiz and win a tiny computer? Not a bad result for a test…

So ServerMojo periodically pings your servers and reports and whether the ping comes back. I had 2 twitter DMs today noting a 3 hours when CogDogBlog went belly up, one message when it went down and another when it returned:

Maybe I am better off not knowing? Oh well.

I have two servers set- one is CogDogBlog and the other is the NMC web site – I plan to do another for the NMC MySQL service because it did get overloaded twice in the last few months.

You also get some basic uptime charts:

So far its a nifty service at a niftier price. $0.

Such a high was the 2008 Northern Voice Conference and how quickly it seems gone. By far, this surpasses by experience her two years ago, my first Moose ride. Its as much for the gathering of creative people that seem to be everywhere in Vancouver, the low overhead personal way a conference is organized (as opposed to the big conferences that leave one cold), but mainly for the camraderie of being with many of my favorite colleagues, so a shoutout to Brian Lamb (tireless organizer and generous party host) and of course Keira (letting us rampage their house); D’Arcy Norman (sheer genius with code and camera); Scott Leslie (amazing array of knowledge of tech, movies, literature, music); Jim Groom (unbridled energy for everything, and a damn fine blues singer); Chris Lott (tireless driver and the most amazing faciliator, and another with a range of knowledge I cannot see the limits of); Jennifer Jones (tireless tweeter, ustreamer, and bravery for hanging out with edugeeks).

And this does not even count the long list of other people I got to meet with and talk to at Northern Voice. I have added my last little bits of photos and soon to be fading memories to the VoiceThread I slapped together (in lieu of blogging- see exploring new technology is now a blogging excuse!)

So check it out and add some comments! We need your audio comments!

And there are only some 2300 flickr photos marking the event. “I’ll be back!” he says for 2009.

The killer was one that came in on an NMC site purporting to be from a “blog” with a url like education DOT blogslog DOT info that the only “education” seemed to be strange studies of less than main line video clips:

I really dont think blacklists do much, but if you bother to hope otherise, ban this IP, source of this crap spewing site 74.86.186.66

Over the last three weeks, all of my blogs have been getting spam, from random or at least non repeating (spoofed?) IPs that all look like:

<strong>How to Choose the Right Home Builder...</strong>

How to Choose the Right Home Builder Building your own home 
is one of life's turning points. Who would pass up the excitement 
of putting up their very own abode? Everyone wants to build a 
home according to his or her taste and style....

I can guarantee none of my blogs are about building houses, but whomever the SpamMaster is, all of the content looks like this- an opening title in <strong>…</strong> tags, then a few lines of crap.

Repeatedly, and apparently in total vain, I have blogged openly that the Great God Google has some responsibility here. Why? It is the pursuit of Google Page Rank and the methodology that gets sites to appear on Google tat is the 10000% motivation for comment spammers- they will do everything possible to force a URL into any open orifice of a web site, meaning any form that will manage to post a link to a web site. The more links into a Evil Crap Ass Site a spammer can generate, the more page rank the links form there get.

Google creates ALL of the incentive for blog spam, and from what I can see, has done absolutely zero to do something about it. With all their gazillions of dollars, skyrocketing stock prices, legions of brilliant technical staff… the sit on their collective hands (or whatever happens at the GooglePlex) while tens? more of thousands of individual bloggers are over run with what is basically a frontal assault attack on their personal publishing space.

If I were a new blogger, and got the crap I mention above in my blog on my passionate topic, be it education or knitting or fishing or exotic race cars… I would be quick to give up.

It’s time someone holds Google’s feet to some fire. I dont have that kind of power, but what the bleepity bleep bleep bleep BLEEP is it going to take?

Google, I love your search and tools, but your monetary incentive providing to blog spammers is killing the love.

It’s rather simple to me- remove the incentive / reward for spammers, and their activity goes away (or elsewhere). Google has enough intellectual prowess to create some amazing pieces of technology, but I’ve not seen one bit of that go into stomping out this menace. Oh, well I should give credit for the impressive “nofollow” tag (yeah, like that did anything).

Damn you, Google do something now about comment spam. Damn you, Google do something now about comment spam. Damn you, Google do something now about comment spam. Damn you, Google do something now about comment spam. Damn you, Google do something now about comment spam. Damn you, Google do something now about comment spam. Damn you, Google do something now about comment spam. Damn you, Google do something now about comment spam. Damn you, Google do something now about comment spam. Damn you, Google do something now about comment spam. Damn you, Google do something now about comment spam. Damn you, Google do something now about comment spam. Damn you, Google do something now about comment spam. Damn you, Google do something now about comment spam. Damn you, Google do something now about comment spam. Damn you, Google do something now about comment spam.

Am I the only one incensed? I feel I am alone, howling at the moon. In vain.

Grrrrrrr. Was hoping for a happy blog post day, but the rain of spam has killed that.

Al does these fantastic web blogging projects with 3rd grade (or properly Year 3) students at Glenelg School in Adelaid, Australia. For his second year of his miniLegends project (those would be his students, see what they did in 2007), Al is asking for edubloggers to become miniLegend Mentors for this year’s students more or less picking a young blogger and agreeing to reglular comment on their blog.

If you’re an educational blogger of any kind (or visitor) and would like to ‘mentor a mini’ then please leave a comment on THIS page saying who you would like to be connected with. The idea is to drop into their blogs from time to time throughout the year and leave a positive comment . Very simple … why not join in the fun?

How could one resist? And there I was at 2am local time signing up.

I first connected with Al last year via some blog comments and have just been utterly amazed at the wonderful work he is able to do with 8 and 9 year old bloggers and web adventurers (see his Quest Atlantis project). He seems to have an upper hand, or at least some cooperation, at his school, and if you are a K-12 teacher, I am sure the approaches he has done to take care of the concerns of kids “protection” is valuable stuff.

Keep an eye on the miniLegends- and (ahem) if 8 and 9 year old kids can get a handle on becoming effective bloggers, there’s no reason why adults should have any trouble, right?

Personally (and unscientifically) that is many of our own problems as “mature adults”- overwhelmed, we’ve lost the play, sense of wonder, and excitement for life that radiates from an 8 year old. We think too much about what other people will say of us, we over analyze, and we operate from fear rather than curiosity.

Grab it back. Now. Your inner miniLegend is still there.