CogBlogged Tagged ‘web serendipity’

cc licensed ( BY SD ) flickr photo shared by x-ray delta one I do believe in the Six Million Dollar Man, but not Bigfoot… Now hold on to your comments, kids. I believe in Serendipity, I live and breathe its fumes for all of my online career.. How else might I have gotten to house sit for a month in Iceland, have a German Rock Band use my photo for cover of a CD, or get invited to do a month of workshops/presentations in Australia crammed into two weeks?? I would think “Serendipity” is my middle name. But Serendipity is not a thing. You do not create it or cause it or make it.. it happens. This has been rolling around in the part of my brain that carefully organizes drafts for blog posts (hah) after Deen Shareski-d Pursuing Intentional Serendipity. Now, as usual, I agreed, grokked, nodded with [...]

When I reflect back on being on the web for 17 years, I feel old and pathetically nostalgic. But then, a pinch of web serendipity buoys my up past the oosphere. It keeps happening again and again, the internet feels on one hand truly infinite in breadth and odd crannies, and then pulled to human scale again by a small act of connection. Chance. Why did I turn left and not right? why did I take the stairs and not the elevator? There’s no answer. A few weekends ago, I was enjoying a magically beautiful weekend in San Francisco, and after a lovely lunch in Sausalito, just happened to walk out to the waters edge to see this guy: cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog He was calmly doing what seemed impossible, assembling these improbable balancing acts– and under extremely windy conditions. I honestly spent about [...]

By sheer accident I stumbled across the google search results display that matches results to a timeline, here is a technology timeline This apparently lists results that have both your search keyword and a date. I cannot figure out how I got there, but if you take any standard results, say the big wide search on technology. From the results, on the left side bar, click the link for timeline. Now you can adjust the time range, or change the search terms, this time, say I wanted to create a search history timeline for China It could be an interesting activity/exercise to create other timelines. Google embeds surprising functional bits i search results. Looking to calculate a currency exchange? Just google “currency exchange” and you get a widget calculator right there. Have you found other embedded tools in search results? Thanks for the surprise serendipity (as if there were any [...]

cc licensed flickr photo shared by Jenny P. If we just lived our lives out by setting, pursuing, and meeting objectives, what a sterile world it would be. Here;s to what you learn when you are not expecting too, and for surfing by serendipity. Serendipity is following the curious post titles in your RSS reader, leading my to Andy Rush sharing his discovery of a utility called Evom (well that was a nice find there– ). But since Andy played around with the backwards spelling things– I thought it would be fun to write a bit of my comments in reverse text. Now I thought I did this in BBEdit before, but I think I did something insane like a grep search to put each letter on a separate line, a reverse line sort, and a search and replace on the line return characters. Surel;y someone has created something like [...]

Again, nothing warms this web dog’;s heart that accidentally discovering something useful. With my two daily photo habits (@dailyshoot and 2010/365 photos) I am continually having to seek out specific bits of information. For dailyshoot I check in the morning what the assignment is usually by a visit to their twitter page or checking an RSS feed). For naming of my daily photos, I use a title based on the day number of the year (today is the 64th day of the year). I usually flip open a Mac OS X dashboard widget I found 2 years ago, but I have to enter the date for it to calculate the day of the year. In one tweet, I now have a more elegant solution, and learned something I did not know was possible. @dailyshoot shared this message: Tip from @lyzadanger on a great way to keep up with the Daily [...]

cc licensed flickr photo shared by storem Some of my favorite software moments are accidentally discovering something new in a tool I’ve been using for some time. This happened recently my my current iPhone Twitter client, Tweetie 2. I’m not writing about this app, but I’d heard people rave about it, shrugged them off, then eventually later found out they were right. It is smartly designed. I’d noticed when looking at someone’s profile that there is a number below their icon… (and actually I was not ego-ing my own profile, its just an example) (seriously) (I swear). So what is #740,343? Perhaps its obvious, but I wanted to know. Maybe it is some sort of ranking, like I am the 740,343rd ranked tweeter. Yeah, I could only dream to rank that high. My hunch was/is that it is more or less my database ID in twitter, a user number, and [...]

Harvard Law prof Jonathan Zittrain deals with big scary issues, like encroachment of first amendment rights online and the invasions of privacy from bad software. His recent book paints a possible dark future for the internet. So it was a wonderful surprise when on last week’s plane travel I watched his TED Talk on The Web as random acts of kindness Zittrain here gives a brilliant, upbeat talk, and actually explains how the internet works (no tubes) – as he does so by comparing the movement of packets to how a beer gets passed down the row to someone at the ball game. More than that, the picture he paints that the mechanisms and bits that make the whole machine hum along, the vehicle that propels Wikipedia, has to do with a small number of people volunteering to do collective acts of good deeds, kind of Amazing Story like things [...]

I’ve been mumbling in twitter (like anyone notices) about a very interesting data gathering/visualizing tool that rides the back coat tails of twitter in a clever way. I’ll spill the beans first, but stick around for the story and the after blog coffee, okay? Your Flowing Data (YFD) is described by its creator, Nathan, as “a Twitter application that lets you collect data about yourself.” but that does not really capture the magic essence. I stumbled here in one of those lovely incidents of web serendipity aka happy accidents. I was being interviewed last week by someone asking about emerging technologies, and I mentioned being interested visualizations of data. We started talking about great sites and tools- I mentioned Information Aesthetics and the interviewer mentioned another site called Flowing Data a blog about “Data and Visualization (subtitle “Strength in Numbers:). It took about one glance and I was subscribing to [...]

Maybe a flickr easter egg, but you cannot find this site from flickr’s explore, so check out the Flickr Clock. It presents a timeline of flickr videos: It may take a bit long to load as it seems to be hitting the flickr api pretty hard. So find an interval in time, and you can explore someone’s flickr posted video. It’s an interesting interface, the slits expand to play a video: But what is interesting is that if you use the blue buttons on the right or left to navigate in time, the next (or previous) videos will launch and play automatically, so you could just set this up and take a sample of people’s various videos from around the world, from drives in traffic or the train, to sunsets, to quirky sing alongs. I stumbled on a neat time lapse of a highway commute They are rather variable in [...]

I got something in the mail yesterday that moved me so much, it has taken another day to get to blog about it (is that slow enough for the slow blogging crowd). I have to weave a back story before I get to the punch line about getting something back (not tangible, but emotional) for giving to an organization. We should not be giving to get, but there are things we can get than will feed back into the giving cycle. If that is not confusing enough, my seven blog readers, then you must be skimming. Slow down and read. In August I wrote about a different way to make a WordPress plugin (to the four remaining readers, do not gloss over, this is not a post about technology). Joe Solomon had asked 10 educational bloggers to try out the Possibly Related Classroom Projects plugin. The plugin analyzes the text [...]