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 Shoot: http://bit.ly/apTnnc Thanks Lyza!

Basically, you use the Safari browser (just to set these up) to visit the Dailyshoot assignments page, and select Open in Dashboard from the File menu.

This presents an interface where you can size the portion of the page you want to use, in this case, the top left is always the most recent assignment:

and when you click Add on the far right, it makes a Dashboard widget from that web content- so when the site changes tomorrow, my widget will as well.

Wow, who knew one could do that? Well I didn’t.

So I went one more, and I looked for a web page that would show the current date as a day number of the year- This site from Calendar Date shows more than I need, but I clipped it to show the calendar, current day highlighted, and at the bottom in gray text it gives the day number.

Now I have both tools on my dashboard

I don’t know what else I might need this for, but knowing I can clip bits of the web on my dashboard is a nice little trick to have in the MacArsenal.

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 therefore, the lower the number, the earlier you joined. (later– this makes sense when looking at my RSS URL http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/740343.rss)

I looked at a few accounts I know are recent (this year), and sure enough they are in the #16,000,000’s. And then I looked at Cole Camplese’s profile, cause I more or less followed him in January 2007 when he started blogging about twitter:

Sure enough, he is #690,253 a little before me (scooped again by the Senator from Pennsylvania!).

I cannot even think of the value of knowing this is, besides scratching the curiosity itch.

But next, I was curious about the little card icon– like here in Scott Leslie’s profile:

Nice, look at the big number– #3,567,831 – courtesy of the great Jaiku walkout, eh?

But here was a nice feature, clicking the card icon added info from this twitter profile to my address book:

It added his twitter icon, twitter URL, and below the fold, his mini bio in a notes field.

This again, is hardly world changing, or even significant, but it struck me as a nicely, understated feature in Tweetie 2 (and its primary features are plenty enough as is).

So what have you found my clicking mystery buttons? Probably more than me….

cc licensed flickr photo shared by Impact Tarmac

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

The Internet, he suggests, is made up of millions of disinterested acts of kindness, curiosity and trust.

I see them all the time, and often barely take notice (maybe because I am used to them). Just today, I got an email from Doug Gilford, letting me know that he changed the URLs of a blog post I had written… back in 2005.

Oh yes, some of it is in his own interest, as the links lead to his on site, but he sat down and wrote a personal email. SO as a thanks, I will give a shout out here for Doug’s AMAZING site- the complete archive of MAD magazine covers http://www.madcoversite.com/.

To me, it is these single person niche web sites– brimming with passion for a specific topic — that are the positive outcomes of what the “millions of disinterested acts of kindness” enables.

Long live the odd, strange, dedicated, amazing web sites that are out there, more than anyone can count or know. Gawd, no I am getting teary eyed.

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 the RSS feed, and it was scrolling down the bottom when I caught the link for Your Flowing Data (YFD).

So the ideas is that it is a site you can use to track data for things you do regularly, or might want to monitor over time. And the nifty trick is you use twitter Direct Messages to send data to your YFD account. Also smart is that it uses Twitter OAuth for this part and for authenticating your YFD account. You simply need to follow @yfd (so you can send direct messages)

On reading the guide, it suggested picking something that represents an action phrase like “ran 1 mile” “ate chocolate” “Watched Waterworld” (ew, that one will never be in my log). A key is using a consistent data input pattern,

I decided to aim for some health related activities. Since I test my blood sugar several times a day for my diabetes, this seemed like something that was do-able. After doing a test, all I needed to do was send a direct message to @yfd with a message of glucose XX where XX was the measured amount.

(I did mess up twice and sent a public tweet).

Now my blood glucose monitor already tracks data and actually transmits it by wireless to my insulin pump (which helps on calculating the amount of insulin to take at meal time), so actually I have automated data:

but here is the trick. To get the data off of the pump, I have to connect it to my PC (the software only works in Internet Explorer) and then the data is locked in some format where all I can is generate pre-designed reports as PDFs. I cant do anything with the data except look at it.

The data is there, it’s my data, my there are only limited things I can do with it. Its rigid.

SO yes, getting the data into the Flowing Data site is a tad tedious (typing direct messages), but the beauty is the open endedness of the choices you can make about what to record and how to use it. YFD does not define what I enter as only exercise data or movies watched or food ate– I can create my own taxonomy of action words and data types. YFD is neutral on the kinds fo data that go into it.

I also decided to track the miles I run (d yfd ran 12 miles– yeah I am dreaming!), bike (d yfd biked 25 miles — more dreaming!), and other exercise as I add (d yfd walked 3.5 miles… d yfd kayaked 6 miles). Actually I dont even need to include the “miles” if I assume any number I enter is in miles (or kilometers or cubits or nanometers). And on top of that, for any physical activity, I add the time spent in minutes (d yfd exercised 75 minutes).

If I just enter something directly, it references it to the current time, but you can also give a time when the activity occurred, like d yfd read War and Peace at 5:30am

The data in YFD is all private- I am the only one that can see my data, though I can share the results in ways I define.

My YFD home page on the web shows a snapsot of my recent activity:

There are several elegant ways to visualize all my activity, one by calendar that shows at a glancea long view (over a year) but allows me to quickly pull up data by day:

The Tree Map shows at a glance what your most frequent activities are, each one hyperlinked to filter the data by that activity

And I can also go right to my data logs, edit entries, and export data in tab delimited format (no API yet for data):

That gives you some flexibility in viewing data (and there are search terms on all these pages to narrow the scope), but you can also define your own “pages” where you can mix and match bits of your data like averages, sums over time, data by time, last data lists, etc each as “modules” that you can move about on a page like Google Gadgets– and these pages you can make private or public– so here is my Glucose Readings page:

http://your.flowingdata.com/cogdog/page/82/

And you can mis and match kidns of data, so I have an exercise page that has calculations on my total time exercising, and then data displays for my runs and walks, plus even some of the glucose stuff– http://your.flowingdata.com/cogdog/page/83/

Yes, the manual direct messaging for inputting data is not optimal- it would not take much for a real geek to figure out a way for my blood test gizmo to send a tweet for me– but imagine if all kinds of medical devices were recording data in real time, submitting it through the nets to places where doctors can see them at any time (not just an office visit) or be able to do more aggregate scanning of public health (which feeds into great ideas like crowdsourcing medical treatments at http://www.patientslikeme.com/).

I’ve still not done enough to get a feel for the value of this as a tracking tool over the long haul, but I am most excited about how open ended a system this is. You can define any kinds of reporting system that you can dream up- you just need to frame it in verbs (actions) and nouns (measurements). And being able to mix and match data in such an easy way to generate visuals feels really powerful. I still don’t have an inkling for what, but sometimes you don’t know the full potential of something til later.

Mmmm, yummy data. And visualization!

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 (ahem) cinematic quality, and is more a look at everyday life that people choose to share than being mini Sundance epics..

It appears the videos are plucked from the flickr clock group, and then put on the timeline:

Flickr Clock is an ongoing project that will collect member video and display it according to the (approximate) time that it was taken. As more members participate, we’ll have the opportunity to experience what a moment in time looks like from a diversity of perspectives.

Help us build a clock that celebrates the Flickrverse — in how, despite our borders or geography, we’re very much the same and uniquely different.

The time is posted via use of a “machine tag” to identify the time– first time I heard about machine tags that apparently provide hooks for doing third (or first in the case) party apps with flickr media (hey, just dream of this happening on stingy facebook) and woah, neo, there are ways to do wild card characters in these tags and related searches, what happy serendipity to find a new nugget of flickrness.

More on machine tags as it was announced in the flickr api discussion group (its a good sign when a web app can use itself to talk about itself):

“Machine tags” is the technical term for the extra hamsters we’ve added to the Flickr servers to formalize how these sorts of tags are treated. I’ve included a “Ceci n’est pas un FAQ” below with all the details.

For the moment, machine tags are principally an API “thing”. The photo pages have been updated to display tags a little differently but otherwise all the magic you can perform with machine tags happens here at the API layer. (This includes the special wildcard syntax for searching photos with machine tags.)

From my quick read, individuals can define their own machine tags to do whatever they want. This kind of thing could be explosive in the hands of a wizard like Tony Hirst… (ping ping rings the web doorbell).

After 5 years, flickr is still the best place in the web2iverse. Please Yahoo, stay in business!

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 of a post, and appends links to 3 potentially relevant projects listed among the 14,000 plus ones at DonorsChoose.

DonorsChoose is a place where teachers from disadvantaged schools can post project ideas that need funding (small scale, classroom projects) for materials, with the idea that people willing to donate money can select a project that they would like to support.

I was skeptical, since a lot of what I write here seems to not have much relevance to school projects. But as I wrote in August, a post I wrote about my experience with “moo cards” linked me to three projects, that by title seemed far off, but as I read the project detail, was excited, especially one project for a school in Phoenix (Think Local) was asking for money to stimulate kids interest in reading by buying some classic story books, and one of the books listed was Click, Clack, Moo (and more great books on the project list like Where the Wild Things Are) and that ironically was a book I had just purchased for myself (and enjoyed, even at my supposed advanced age, see my level of literature is about 2nd grade).

This was too much serendipity– my blog post on moo cards to a project in Arizona for kids reading Click, Clack, Moo that I had just bought — I had to donate to the Literacy Pills project.

So back to yesterday. I get a somewhat thick packet in the mail from Donors Choose that is described in the letter as a “thank you package” from the teacher her students.

It includes a detailed one page Project Cost Report that shows exactly where the money went (to buy 17 books!), a chronological Fulfillment Report, that also shows the logistical support DonorsChoose provides- they review the proposal, verify material costs, and even orders them for the teacher.

But there is more.

The teacher who ran the project included an appreciative note:

… Your donation helped me pass on my love of reading to my students, who are at an age where they will learn to either love or hate reading. Thanks to your gift, many of my students love reading and contantly beg to take the books home every night!

When my students finish their work early, they often pick out a book to read. It should be noted that the books you donated are usually the first chosen. It’s a delight to see them so excited about reading some classic books that I myself read when I was young. Your donation fueled that excitement, and for that, I sincerely thank you. It thrills me to se that my students do not approach reading as a chore but as a delightful activity. Thank you for making this possible!

Wow, that is really something.

Yet there is more- part of the project funding including giving the teacher a (probably disposable) camera and DonorsChoose processes the photos which I get copies of in my thank-you package:

But wait, there is more, much more…

The envelope also includes hand written thank you notes from the students, and there, melt goes my heart reading them. I scanned a few into a PDF to share:

Student Letters (2.1Mb PDF)

Even if these were done as “Now let’s sit down and write letters before recess” they are still so precious and full of that honesty kids have when they are still wide-eyed and full of excitement and enthusiasm (before we school it out of them).

I am very touched.

Wow, do you think I am a bit motivated to give again to DonorsChoose?

You bet,

I gave, and I got, and am ready to give.

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Next time you need a good nom de plume, try the Mob Name Generator. Tell them Shakes Pretiili sent you.

Yes, I am all over the Generator Blog a nearly infinite list of fun little things to do on the web that create things dynamically.

Next up… maybe.. the Chinese movie generator, the Swedish Furniture Name, or next time some asks you for a reference, spit out something with the Endorsement Generator.

Besides the silly stuff, which of course is very important here at CogDogBlog, I found a link to PhotoSoup which creates a word finder puzzle generated by pairs of tags in flickr… very cool indeed:

PhotoSoup is a visual word puzzle generator that allows users to create word search puzzles with tag-photo pairs taken from Flickr. The tag is hidden in the puzzle, and only the associated photo is shown as a clue. The objective is to find all hidden tags in the puzzle before you run out of time.

I just made one based on my flickr account- it creates a word puzzle based on my own tags with images from other flickr users who deploy the same tags:

But wait! There is more! You can generate embed code to put a PhotoSoup puzzle in any web page. The size is pretty large, so I put in on a wikispaces site as a demo:

http://cogdog.wikispaces.com/PhotoSoup

and even cooler is that every time it loads (I think) you get a different puzzle.

Its a good day when you start having fun looking at silly things and then fall into sweet serendipity land of finding neat sites like PhotoSoup.

Just don’t mess around with Mr Petrilli. I warned ya.

Maybe two months from now will mark the 15th year I have been on the web. This will be October 29, exactly at 10:30am, 15 years to the minute when I inserted a floppy disk labeled “Mosaic” (in perhaps a Mac Quadra 900) that my Maricopa colleague Jim Walters had handed me, and had said, just with a smile, “Try this”.

Profound moment indeed.

In all this time, I have never lost a shred of excitement over those crazy serendipity happenings, connections, opportunities, that present themselves only because the web was there. Things that would not have happened otherwise, in that creepy parallel universe where there is no internet, no world wide web.

So I am going to toss out a few and see if others pick up and share there own. My stipulation is that each story much have a link to an artifact of the story. Cause if there ain’t a link, its not a web.

I have tons of stories, but will keep it to three.

How do You Say HTML in Icelandic?
One of my early successful web projects was Writing HTML — dating back to 1994– a tutorial on old school web content creation, where you could learn tags, linking, etc while building a fake web page about Volcanoes. Sometime in the mid 1990s I got an email from a teacher in Iceland asking if was okay to translate the lessons into his language. The entire package was always available for free download and re-use, so I said “sure” and warned Gudjon that there were like 120 files inside of it that would need translation.

I forgot about it, but months later, I got an email that said here it is – http://thor.vma.is/tut/ and wow, I could recognize by content in shape, but “NÁMSEFNISGERÐ Í HTML” read like:

Þegar þú ert búinn með námskeiðið getur þú gert röð samtengdra vefsíða um hvaða efni sem er og sett það upp með forsniðnum texta, myndum, og vefstiklum (e. Hyperlink) í aðrar síður á Internetinu

That is only part of the story. In 1999, Gudjon recommended me to a colleague in Reykjavik, and in June I was flying there to give workshops to a group of social studies teachers. After that part, I was on a small plane flying to Isafudor to meet Gudjon for the first time.

From me posting web pages Arizona to meeting a colleague at his home near the arctic circle in Iceland? Only by the web did this happen.

My Death Valley Photo As German Rock Band Album Art
I refuse to be convinced that you gain by locking up and protecting your “intellectual property”, and my mode of operation from my first steps onto the web were very simple- give my stuff away. Cause you get things back, and better than tangible are incredible experiences that can make you look like a wide eyed babe.

Back in 1988, when I was a grad student in the Geology program at Arizona State University, I had some wonderful “commutes” to the area I was studying for my Masters these near Bishop, California. One route I took was across Death Valley, and even then, long before a digitqal camera was even a glimmer of an idea for me, I was taking photos of weird signs… in this case, my car, a 1973 Ford Maverick, parked in front of the sign in Death Valley that said “Sea Level”:

Years later, when I had access to tools in my job at Maricopa, I scanned the photo and dropped it somewhere in the pile of my 1990s vintage “home page”. Interestingly enough, it was the file name of my photo, [

]czoxMzpcInNlYS1sZXZlbC5qcGdcIjt7WyYqJl19[

] that enabled a German rock band to find my image — the name of their band was The Sea Level. And they were interested in using my photo as cover art for their next CD.

I was maybe a bit skeptical, but had nothing to lose by shipping them off a higher res version of my photo. And darned, if months later, did I get en envelope of a music CD with a familiar photo on the cover:

Only on the web would a German band find a photo for their music from an obscure directory of a web geek in Arizona.

Unidentified Arizona Flowers Spotted in Tasmania
I still have to question whether this last story could have really happened, but I was there, and it did.

I have a part of a presentation called Being There in that Unevenly Distributed Future where I try to make a pitch that on our human scale we cannot really grasp the immense size and breadth of the net. Its on a scale beyond our senses, like the physical scale of one puny human at the Grand Canyon. So I shared a few examples that are, I hope, more appreciable than talking about “millions of blog posts per day”.

I am doing this presentation at the first stop of my October 2007 Australia tour for a group of educators gathered in Hobart, Tasmania. I tell them of this little trick I learned on flickr– as I enjoy taking macro shots of flowers, I really am terrible at identifying them. So by accident, I learned if I use the words “unknown flower” or “unidentified flower” in a description, that often people seek these out and will tell you, in the comments what the species is.

So I have a preset flickr search string that pulls up maybe 13 phorts from my stream that have that as a description/ So in Tasmania, I scroll up and down thatr page and decide to use an orange one as an example.

I tell the audience how I posted the image and a someone named “Kirsty S” commented, “I suspect it is a ranunculus.”

Here I am in Tasmania telling this story (I could have picked any of 12 other photos) and a hand goes up halfway back of the room and a woman says, “That was me! I am Kirsty S”.

I am sure my heart stopped a beat.

Or twelve.

The odds of this seem astounding to me. But I was there, and so was Kirsty S

Only on the web could have this connection happened.

It is these stories that keep me going, and hoping for more.

So what are your “only on the web” wild stories?

I have a technique that never fails to give me a lift (when it works), yet I can hardly claim it is reproducible. It’s equivalent to kicking over a rock when hiking just to see what might be hiding underneath, when you find something cool (or just as not, squishy) in an expected place.

For a while I have been saying I should keep track of all the useful or interesting things I have found online by sheer serendipity. The best part is the surprise factor, and that it is very likely something that is not in everyone else’s news feed.

One source that works occasionally is scanning the links people put in their e-mail footers. Sure mostly it is their blog, or their company, or their math department.. but quite often people put links in their footer to something they are truly passionate about. When the listservs I read are dull, I scan the footers.

The one I can remember is someone on the Second Life Educators List had a link to Free Rice, a fun site that offers a multiple choice quiz to identify the meaning of a word:

For each word you get right, we donate 20 grains of rice to the United Nations World Food Program.

Okay, 20 grains is pretty small, but spell a lot of words right and…. But its a great concept that ties together two unrelated goals (getting “smarter” and feeding the world) in a clever way.

The other thing I do when looking at people’s web sites, especially blogs, is trying to figure out all the widgets and tools hung off the edges. Not to necessarily clutter up my own site (which needs no help with clutter), but sometimes you come across an interesting web service or tool.

Last week I was reading Beth’s Blog about A couple of really refreshing and practical posts about using Twitter where she was describing the blog of “, AJ Vaynerchuk ‘a 21 year old blogger who also dabbles in social media, marketing, and SEO.’ (boy was I dabbling in the wrong things at 21)… but out of curiosity, I peeked at his blog. First I was interested in his use of the Travelogue WordPres template. I had used an earlier version (hacked up too by be) for my I hate Running Blog.

But then for some reason I noticed a tiny link in the bottom cornered labeled “Get Clicky”.

I got curious.

And kicked over a rock.

And found Clicky a really awesome web stats package! I am testing it out now on CogDogBlog (and getting depressed at hoe short people visit here; the average is 2 minutes! Wow I am that interesting). and on the NMC web site as well.

We’ll probably end up getting a license for NMC, it just blows the doors off of other stats packages, including the one by that little company whose name begins with a “G”.

I would have not found this without looking around, peeking in the source code, etc.

One more.

I monitor links to NMC’s work with a few RSS feeds from Technorati and Google blog searches. I was looking at some Spanish language blog entry that linked to our just published summary of an NMC survey. First I frittered around trying to get Babelfish to do a reasonable translation.

But then I noticed the little icon at the bottom, which looked like en embedded version of the PDF document we published. This widget was animating flipping pages that looked like miniature versions of the document and a few buttons. Hmmmm I thought, might be some new way of embedding documents.

And then I landed on the site it came from — issuu which I am seeing is sort of a mashup of YouTube and Flickr for PDFs.

issuu is a living library. Upload and share the web’s best publications and get recommendations form your friends.

Its language revolves around sharing “magazines”, like Great Lakes Boating August 2008 issue- it is rich graphics, the pages flip when you turn them, you can zoom in and pan, etc:

On the right side are “related issuus” (like YouTube does). And the lower part looks a bit flickr-ish with comments, plus some embed code options.

So you can embed this boating magazine into your site (no thanks). But it looks like you can mark issuus you like (favorites) in a library, and I expect there are some recommendations or FOAF stuff woven in there. And there are tags! And on the main page are some categories to explore, one of them is “Portfolios” -not really “ePortfolio” stuff, but visual records of some rather nice art portfolios, say this example from Chris Bergman

Its visually well done as a site and seems to have some of that good web 2.0 formula of giving something of value to individuals and then added bonus when you mix them in a bigger pot.

My visit to issuu was really brief, but it is now registered in my mind, and I found it merely with some curious clicking, rock kicking.

I have no idea if other people do this- if so, what have you found that rocked the house?

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.