CogBlogged Tagged ‘web good dog’

I don’t spend much time with OS X widgets, and I prefer not to load up as the eat RAM, but I just found a very useful and free one worth the RAM. TimeScroller allows you to enter 8 different cities around the world. Now here is what’s cool, the scroll bar allows me to slide time to see how it matches up in different cities, so it can help you schedule meetings with people in other zones, or to deal with trying to plan things in Second Life, where time is referenced to Pacific time. But it gets better- when you click the icon in the lower left, it launches a new email message wth the times listed so you can send them to your colleagues. Did I mention this was free?

Rev up your LP of “Who’s Next”: I’m readin’ feeds And when I want to read blogs, I’m going mobile Well I’m gonna find a blog on wheels, see how it feels, Goin’ mobile Keep me feeding Actually not, as my mobile phone does not much more than allow phone calls and taking blurry photos. Oh, I can send messages to twitter. But someday, someday, I will have a real phone, that can do things like get web content and read QR codes- those bar codes which can link mobiles to web content. I got interested in them a bit when I stumbled across Semapedia, a web tool for putting bar codes in the world that link locations to info in Wikipedia. Today I got a link (was it from RSS, twitter? who knows any more) to Brent Schlenker’s post onn publishing a conference guide that had embedded QR codes [...]

I’m still scratching my head to find out exactly why I think this is interesting… I just have that tingly feeling. But as we see ever increasing of interest in virtual worlds, continued explosion of web things, mashups, and mobile technologies, its the connections of them that seem to intrigue me the most. Although I lack a phone even capable of tis stuff, the things that allow people to connect by mobile devices, share, acquire thing in our every day meanders, or via coordinated efforts seem to be underplayed in education (with notable efforts), especially considering the proliferation of mobile phones in many pockets. There are many examples of the kind of creative group activities facilitated by phones +/- web +/- geo-location data like you see at the Come Out & Play Festivals. They are simple and elegant in design, and do not call for massive amounts of technology. And [...]

For a long time I have continually raved about what I think is a severely under-used Cool Flickr Feature- the ability to add notes, or hypertext regions to images. For many long, winter nights, I have wondered.. Why Dont Teachers Jump All Over Such a Thing?, but alas, gave up on hearing an answer from the mountain. Just on a whim today- my colleague Joe Lamber asked if I knew of a web tool that allowed one to annotate any image with a push pin and a note like Google does for the maps, that I came across a holy grail I never knew existed- Fotonotes – code that provides any web site the ability to add this feature to image content: FotonotesTM is an [sic] standard, specification, and collection of scripts for annotating images. And towards the bottom, it is credited as the inspiration for the early flickr-ites to [...]

Pshaw to bloggers who cut off or dont harvest their comments! I got rich today! Thanks to Matt M who commented on my “Anyone Remember Podcasting” post, he pointed my to EveryZing- as search services that does keyword searches among audio and video content — and returns results that are linked directly to the segment that matches. It appears they achieve this feat by using speech to text technology yielding a transcript which can then be indexed for searching. I thought I had seen this before in a site called Podzinger, and checking the old links there, I find they are one and the same. So for an example, if I am searching for casts that mention NMC, I do a search for “New Media Consortium” (using quotes to phrase search), and a get a list of results, along with a “Play here 3:32″ link that loads a player cued [...]

As much as I complain about getting shafted by lousy customers service and shlocky telephone answer trees, it is well worth my time to flip a positive nod to an amazing level of response. How… um refreshing! Okay, so I was chipping away tonight at a few more examples notched off for the 50 Web 2.0 Ways to Tell a Story workshop — still about at the 40% mark. For a shift, tonight I took a stab at Toondoo, one of the comic strip creation tools. I had steered clear of these knowing they might be hard to work with (limited space and possibly limited graphics), but I found Toondoo fun to work with- a lot of graphics in their library, an ability to upload your own photos, and rock solid embed code. I spent about 45 minutes doing my first “Doo” and when I went to save, it just [...]

Time to dust off your memory cells for how the Period Table of the Elements is organized — but now it is mashedup, recast, and graphicly spun into a new version where websites replace the elements. Get ready to play with the Periodic Table of the Internet: It’s really fun, and interactive, and an interesting (and debatable) in structure. Like the columns of the chemical table, the ‘net table has defined “groups” that are not associated by atomic structure, but function, like I for Search Engines, IV for Aggregators, XIII for Blogs, etc, and their row is according to “rank” – (which rank is not clear– and how the *%#^$ does Yahoo sit above Google?) Anyhow, it makes for a fun visual for talking about the web, each element is hyperlinked. Now my mind is wondering- how do these elements combine… do they form new compounds? Like NtFr2- New York [...]

No, this is not something to gross you out. Who is Sick is a mashup of google maps and people’s self reports of their illness– it provides some data so supposedly you could find out if that queasy feeling in your stomach is…. well something a lot of people in the hood are keeping down. It’s got tags! It’s got tell a friend! It’s got Google Maps! Let’s see what’s hanging over Scottsdale– lots of runny nose / cough action. Better wear a mask out there.

Just when you think you’ve seen enough cool flickr add on tools, 20 more pop up in your reader. SlideFlickr is very handy- ir can generate code for emdedding and flickr set into an external web page, but you can also create embeddable shows based on tags an d other parameters. Or as the site says, and it is true- SlideFlickr will help you create and embed Flickr slideshows in less than 10 seconds. Here is one generated in 4 seconds (!) from my Being There presentation / set:

In the Aimless Wander and Playing with Not Critical Web Site department, I plopped into gizmoz, a site where you upload an image of your face, and it digitizes it, and applies it to an animated avatar… you even add a short recording, and it syncs the animation to your words. The hardest part was getting a clean, license plate stare face shot (I ended up using PhotoBooth on my MacBookPro and cropping out the background in Photoshop). The interface is sort of fun to watch in the little animations it provides as a progress bar, sort of matrix-y code like flying by. It sure beats a blue bar. Anyhow, here is the CogDog Hitman: Express Yourself with Gizmoz Video Clips I have zero claim that this is of educational importance. Pure fun energizes me to return to some data crunching and formatting chores. Do you think that loser from [...]