CogBlogged Tagged ‘web good dog’

It has been a loooooong time since I looked at the Demotivational Posters from Despair, which I can remember from way back when the web was young and we spun HTML by hand. For a lover of sarcasm, this is one of the highest art forms, taking potshots at those motivational posters the PHBes put up in the office to “inpsire” your widget production. For some lost brain neuron snappage, I peeked back and plucked a few fun ones: Intimidation: No one can make you feel inferior without your consent, but you’d be a fool to withhold that from your superiors. Nothing like being the BIG dog!

It’s been almost a month since I blogged about the Chronicle of Higher Education, the “flagship” of the ivory tower had published on their web site misinformation that it had scooped from some other blog sites on a story about the 2007 NMC Horizon Report. The Chronicle wrote on December 17 that the 2007 report was “released last week” when it was published on January 21, 2007 at the annual EDUCAUSE/ELI Conference, where I am fairly sure I recall there were Chronicle reporters in attendance. I duly noted this in a comment. Apparently, the Chronicle website, labeled at the top as “The Wired Campus” does not get or pay attention to comments on its site, does not monitor blog trackback, does not use web 2.0 tools to monitor references to their stories from elsewhere on the internet. Man, are those ivory walls thick! I bet wireless signals cannot penetrate. My [...]

Oh flickr, how I adore thee! my love runneth over… But after a lot of blog rants, its just so nice to say some nice things about nice people. Nice! I always get extra excited when my RSS feed for comments on my pix lights up in that “unread” color, so I checked out a link today, and ugh! It had no context to the photo, and it linked to some wretched site about increasing your web site ranks. Spam comment links in my flickr stream! Tell me it ain’t so! I followed the “Report Abuse” link on the bottom of the screen and saw several categories. Yep, spam. But then it suggested I send it from the profile page of the abuser. Well what a surprise! There were no photos loaded for the scum bag. So I fired off a note, included to the link where the spammer dribble [...]

Thanks to the precedent setting and helpful nudge of D’Arcy Norman (who did this last year), in 2008, I am pledging myself to take and post to flickr every day a photo that best captures what I as doing, or at least what I photographed that day. As D’Arcy notes, it is not easy, but what it does is (I think) stretches your imagination and skills of photography. So while you can find mine as 2008/366 photo set on flickr, the above slide show below was made with SlideFlickr a free web tool that “will help you create and embed Flickr slideshows in less than 10 seconds.” Slideflickr provides extra options, such as the music track. I went to ccMixter, a fab source for free music, where I rummaged a bit and chose this electronic remix: jaspertine lab sound 3.

Wish I had the productivity of Dave Sifry; in his announcement, in 48 hours he rolled out a nifty new twitter/blog crawl mashup called Hoosgot (aka “Who’s Got?”): a simple way to ask who’s got what you’re looking for. Just put “hoosgot” in a blog post or a Twitter tweet and it’ll show up here in Hoosgot. It’s meant to give you a place to send the requests for all of those things that you’ve wanted, but just can’t find – chances are, what you want already exists and someone else out there in the ether knows about it. If someone’s got what you’re looking for, or a clue in that direction, they post a comment. RSS feeds flow from the comments… We humbly trace our roots to the wonderful lazyweb which, unfortunately shut down in 2006. It was a glorious experiment in what the web could produce – co-creation [...]

The blog readability site has plenty of bounces around the blog-o-sphere – plug in a blog URL, and the magical black box somehow comes up with an absolute determination. I am proud to wear by junior high school reading level badge, which means I am certainly writing for an audience that is at a higher maturity level than the author: What is abhorrent is the copy and paste code to put the badge/graphic in your site comes equipped with a link to a site that has no relevance. I removed it from mine, but any marginal credibility this site may have had is tossed into the rubbish bin by tacking on a link to a cash advance web site. I mean WTF is with that? If you copy and paste and code and put into your blog, take a gander at what you are pasting Yeah, my blog may read [...]

Yes another log on the fire for my adoration of flickr. One of my “dogs only” rss feed in my Reader is a watch on my comments in flickr (there is an RSS feed for yourself at http://www.flickr.com/recent_activity.gne?days=2). There is asome bit of ego involved, but mainly so I can reply to comments, yes that is the reason. Anyhow, I saw this one just now, and it did not seem to make a whole lot of sense:\\ But when I went to the photo to see it, I could not find it. And the link took me to some site that had no relevance at all to the photo or comments already posted. So then, just out of curiosity, I followed the link on the commenter where I see: so it seems that flickr is staying on top of this and stomping accounts created for spamming. They did it before [...]

Of course I find the coolest of new stuff in my twitter stream, like from Dean Shareski just know came a link to Tweeterboard- a site that provides analytics on tweeters, their activity, what they are linking to, etc. Tweeterboard is a way of looking at who is influential on Twitter based on their conversations with other Twitter users. There are other services, like Twitterposter, that base influence on how many followers you have. Tweeterboard looks at who talks to you. Tweeterboard also captures links posted to Twitter to generate a list of the most popular links. Reputation points are the way influence is measured in Tweeterboard. They’re calculated using some algorithmic mojo that resembles the link analysis algorithms used by search engines. Your reputation points are based on the conversations you’ve had over the last 28 days, which means your score can jump around a lot. So if you [...]

Gardner Campbell gets interviewed by Jon Udell for ITCoversations… I am all gushing like I know a celebrity. Congrats to Dr Glu!

There are very few things that compel me to use PowerPoint. I have scolded PPT, stomped on it, lifted my doggie leg and peed on it for years… the only reason in the last 12 months I have quietly stifled my contempt is that it is the vehicle where I can post presentations on Slideshare– which I like to call the YouTube of Presentations. When it first came out, it was pretty much a dead ringer for YouTube, though in nice pastel green tones. You upload a Big Fat Media Blob Content (video file of various flavors, hulking powerpoint file), and it converts it to svelte flash format, creating a place on the web to publish your works, and… providing the cut and paste code so you can embed it into other web sites. Since then, Slideshare has added features typical of social networking sites- tags, contacts, messaging, groups, etc. [...]