CogBlogged Tagged ‘web serendipity’

Just be shear, dumb, web clicking serendipity, I came across flickrStorm: FlickrStorm is a better search for Flickr! It works by looking for more than what you enter to find related and more relevant images… Be suprised! Okay, there are scads of flickr search tools, and it’s not exactly clear what this “magic is”, but they certainly have been double dipping their chips in the web 2.0 bowl. More less, you enter a search term and get results as small icons: Clicking the small square icon (it looks like the first set might be the ones by “interestingness”) brings a preview on the right, where you can go to the flickr page for the cute dog picture, or “add to the tray” so it gets saved to a collection on the left. but wait, there’s more. Clicking the “advanced” link brings a drop down menu filter that can help restrict [...]

flickr foto Chain Of Entropyavailable on flickr It’s time to wax again on the sheer giddy glory of stumbling onto web gems by the serendipity of curious link clicking. It started in my RSS feeds, scanning an entry on Net Neutrality Comes Home to Haddam in Mike Roy’s new blog, Digital Incunabula. I actually didn’t even read the whole post (sorry Mike, hope you get to watch the Sox soon). But in the first paragraph, my eyebrow got raise at a link to Wiki in Eductaion — look at the URL www.ikiw.org — “ikiw” is wiki spelled backwards. This site by Stewart Mader (now del.icio.us-ized) looks like a great one for tracking wikis in education. I got distracted by a link to Stewart’s other site, the Science of Spectroscopy which sent me down a riff of memory lane when as an undergrad I had this great part-time job doing electorn [...]

By sheer acts of curious link following, I ended up today learning about Warnock’s Dilemma via Classy’s Kitchen: Warnock’s Dilemma is the situation you face when people don’t comment on your postings: The problem with no response is that there are five possible interpretations: 1. The post is correct, well-written information that needs no follow-up commentary. There’s nothing more to say except “Yeah, what he said.” 2. The post is complete and utter nonsense, and no one wants to waste the energy or bandwidth to even point this out. 3. No one read the post, for whatever reason. 4. No one understood the post, but won’t ask for clarification, for whatever reason. 5. No one cares about the post, for whatever reason. The origin of the dilemma is this post to a perl developers list, and Bryan Warnock provides further historical commentary in this later post to another perl list. [...]

My mind is a leaky sieve. Last year, there was a neat web contest for people to submit an example of a digital story down i video format– with the limit that they had to be under 60 seconds– this was the 60 Second Story site. I was more curious about how it worked, and usually when my curiosity is raised with technology, I jump in. So I quickly outlined a story about my first special dog, a Dalmation named “Dominoe” who ventured west with me in 1987, scanned some photos, laid them out in iMovie, and overlaid an audio track. It maybe was 60 minutes of production.. well maybe more. So my “Domninoe” story made it into the pile: I went back to peek tonight as I was grabbing a video example to use for a podcast demo tomorrow… I needed a clip to toss up Ourmedia, to check [...]

Just when you think you have exhausted all the oddly strange things people have cooked up in a blog, comes along just one more. One Red Paper Clip is documenting the North American (?) Dream: My name is Kyle MacDonald. I started with one red paperclip on July 12th, 2005 and I am making a series of trades for bigger or better things until I get a house. My current item up for trade is one recording contract. You can read current offers here. Do you want a recording contract? Please contact me with your offer at (oneredpaperclip@gmail.com) or phone (514-833-3980). I live in Montreal Canada but will go anywhere in the world for the right offer. – (click on pictures below for stories about each trade.) Only on the web can you get away with this. I love the strangeness of it, as well as the only way I [...]

The notion of “distributed conversations” in blog space seems to rear its head on some cycle. It always seems to boil down to a polarization of those who find some level of comfort in the chaotic widely distributed notion and those that seem to covet the notion that it needs to be nicely organized in one location. Hey folks, it can be both. But first some serendipity. Finding interesting/curious/odd treasures on the web just by happy accident or curiosu link clicking is a little pleasure no search engine will match. I was reading a post at Burning Bird which was of weak interest, when the URL of a commenter grabbed my attention- “ralph” leads to http://www.thereisnocat.com/. Given my overly canine motif here, and previous gentle stabs of blogs as “cat diaries”, I could not resist a click. Okay, There Is No Cat has a feline flavor, but its not about [...]

Wow, and some people think I have an edgy tone in this here blog, especially towards the sacred cow of reusable learning objects, which frankly after several years of looking at, thinking at, I just still do not buy. Yes, RLOs are R.I.P and I have questions lke If All The Learning Objects Are Web Pages Who Needs a Repository? Then yesterday, I stumbled across the Artichoke blog, where a posts on Mr Ed the talking horse on those Digital Learning Objects and Dear Horse God, about those Digital Learning Objects, the Artichoke takes some nice big bites: You cannot earjack a conversation between card-carrying members of the MoE digerati “A-list” at the moment without picking up terms like Learning Management Systems and Digital Learning Object. These terms are tossed like Brassica sprouts into the (e) conversations of the digerati with a facility and confidence that belies the fact that [...]

The least thought-out posts gain the most comment? As a follow-up to Me 2.0 someone kindly sent a serendipitous Bloglines pairing of my post and something else that is sort of related (might need the full-size to appreciate):

Let’s give a big “good on ya, ‘mate!” for the Australia’s ABC Radio National site for offering a ton of their audio in mp3 / podcast format. You can poke around the site and find them, or see the listng of the podcast URLs I googled to I Love Radio.org. This discovery was totally web serendipity… I get an email ding every time someone adds a link to the list of sites using Feed2JS and typically I don’t click as the submission form actually verifies there is a valid use on the site. But for some reason I followed a link to the MovingLines Seasons Change page (it is a wiki… interesting) which used Feed2JS to list some of the Radio National Podcast feed links. Let’s see… the Canadian CBC is doing podcasts, the BBC has ‘em, yet the NPR does not but is “surveying” to understand what people think [...]

Via a recent blog comment I was led by link curiosity to Leigh Blackall’s Teach and Learn Online blog which comes to us from the Blue Mountains of Australia (hence the blue template theme??). From his site, I found a nifty free wiki space called… WikiSpaces where amoung other things like blended learning wikis I found a wiki for Buffalo wings. There’s some nice features here, and each new wiki gets its own URL. Nice. Leigh also has some “screencasts” such as Using Bloglines to Capture NewsFeeds and Stay in Touch With Learning and Using Blogger to Create a Web Journal though here it looks like Leigh is providing the audio to be played while following his well illustrated screen guides. This is just a quick skim, but I’m gonna load his blog on the news reader and follow along for a while. Good on ya!