CogBlogged Tagged ‘web serendipity’

Are You Talking To Me? by cogdogblog posted 6 Sep ’08, 9.49am MDT PST on flickr 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 [...]

flickr photo Autoretrato com Colorado by Paulo Brabo 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 [...]

Perhaps your head is exploding with all the new stuff coming out of every electronic orifice. It might be useful to consider how you go about getting your dose? Maybe it’s RSS, it might be clicking every link shared by a Jedi master, or slogging through the plaff of twitter, heck it might even be from a magazine. 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 [...]

How about yet one more example of neat things that happen when you share your stuff? This is a photo I posted a month ago on flickr; it is a wooden drafting table my Dad had used back in the 1950s and after years of storage in an attic, I decided to re stain it: 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 [...]

CDB readers know my affinity for stories of web serendipity; strange or wonderful connections made that otherwise would have not happened without this “internet” thing- here’s another gem. I’ve forgotten where I first stumbled across on slideshare Power Point 20th Anniversary Cinderella. In 19 slides of lengthly bullet points, inscrutable charts, and exposition, it tells the well-known fairy tale in all the ways we know that PowerPoint can be used to numb an audience. | View | Upload your own Last summer when I was assembling my 50 Web 2.0 Ways to Tell a Story, it struck me that for a section on How Do I Come Up with a Story Idea, it would be a fun way of showing a non-example of how one should tell a multimedia story. In doing the 50 Ways as a presentation, showing Cinderella.PPT never fails to get the audience rolling in laughter- the [...]

This story is old news if you followed my trail last month through Australia. Being up in our cabin again in Strawberry, Arizona, and seeing flowers till blooming in mid November (global warming is hot here) got me thinking again about the most amazing example of web serendipity that happened in Tasmania. Its one of those thing that just reinforces how big and small, flat and bumpy, the world truly is. In my “Being There” presentation I spend a bit of it on trying to remind people how big the internet is. It sounds like an obvious statement– we all know it, right– but it is very similar to Geologic time- we can talk about things being “hundreds of millions of years old” or created “billions of years ago”, but on the human time scale, those spans of time are almost incomprehensible. The same is true (I believe) for the [...]

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 [...]

I love it when curious link clicking reveals unknown gems! It happened again just an hour ago, with the result of a great video collection tool. Almost by sheer accident- discovered following a tweet by Judy O’Connell to her web 2.0 presentation on Slideshare, that I came across this nifty new site, vodpod. Here you can create your own “pods” of video collections, and with their one click browser tools, you can create collections of web video from 1000s of different video sites, YouTube, Google, MySpace, just about anywhere that embeds flash video. You can do some customization of your “pod”, have categories, tags, comments– and it provides a cut and paste method to embed a “widget” in a blog- see the sidebar here under the flickr images, showing the most recently added videos. This is perfect for upcoming October workshops I am doing in Australia, under the pseudonym of [...]

Talk about serendipity! I can count on one or two paws the number of times I've clicked on a Google AdSense ad. But in reading my inbox in Gmail, someone wriote about blog writing, and there was a link to Free Web Word Processor for your Blog.  I bit and look what I got!   it's a web blog editor (not just a weblog editor, it's a web weblog editor) with a "this is what MS word would look like if they really had a premonition of the web or took a ride on the clue train" — yes, like other web document editors, you get the rich text tools offered by TinyMCE under the hood.  I just grabbed a screenshot uploaded to flickr, and can post from my flickr right into the editing screen. Same for YouTube videos.    I'm not in grand need of a better editor (i still [...]

I just love it when I find something cool on the web by accident. We Blog Cartoons does something almost no other cartoon site does– it lets you republish the cartoons without any copyright restrictions (how many times have you used that New Yorker one about “no one in the internet knows you are a dog”?) ‘We Blog Cartoons‘ contains cartoons by Dave Walker which can be freely reused on other weblogs. How to use the cartoons in your own blog: Either: 1. Save the cartoon onto your own webspace and then post the cartoon on your blog, keeping the credit line and link as it is. (The advantage of doing this is that you save me a bit of bandwidth cost and you have full control over the image on your site) Or… 2. Simply copy and paste the code underneath the cartoon in question. Simple as that. So [...]