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?

So the pithy old saying about “thinking my old man was some dumb until I turned 29 and realized how much he learned by then” becomes GraphJammed:

more graph humor and song chart memes

Maps come up a lot from places pop songs reference:

more graph humor and song chart memes

to how Network executives see the US

more graph humor and song chart memes

to an old favorite (because I and 11th grade friends made a Super8 mm movie of it in 11h grade English) I Am The Walrus as a venn diagram

more graph humor and song chart memes

And while I reflect on younger years, from being a lifeguard:

more graph humor and song chart memes

A bit more snarky:

more graph humor and song chart memes

At this rate I might embed every one on the site! Its somewhat silly but also creative. Would it be a creaive exercise to have people illustrate in graph from a common saying or a historical note or?

modified from creative commons licensed flickr photo by pierre pouliquin

This trip is with my NMC colleagues Larry Johnson and Rachel Smith as we go first to Melbourne to launch a new flavor of the NMC’s Horizon Project, working with a new advisory board of Australian and New Zealand educators on Horizon.au,. Out of this effort, we are producing later this year a Horizon Report specifically focused on emerging technology relevant to education in this region.

We are also going to Brisbane and Sydney, visiting in all, the 5 NMC member organizations in Australia: RMIT, University of Melbourne, University of Queensland, University of Woolongong, and University of New South Wales. There might be an intermission in all this to check out the big reef. And I’m looking forward to a beach walk and dinner meet up with a group of colleagues in Sydney, thanks to the choreographing of Angela Thomas for dinner and Sean Fitzgerald for the walk (i understand he has a blog ;-) They keep saying how “freezing cold” it is there, yet the temps don’t look that scary. Heck, I had almost snow in Arizona in summer yesterday.

So expect the 366 photo stream to shift from Arizona flowers and dogs to assorted who knows what I will see in Australia.

And so far, I am avoiding trying to toss out any cute Australian phrases. I’ve been told my attempts are lame ;-) I am certainly going to link to this video as an example of learning, instead relying on more trusted sources.

Okay, I am really excited about this trip! It took some restraint not to pack a month ago. We’ll be there July 5-20, and the blog and flickr light shall be lit.

And hopefully no one there will call me a drongo.

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.

reminds me of the mashup I did a few years ago after meeting Doug Engelbart with a screen shot of him from the “Mother of All Demos”

Doesn’t Dr Nemo like rather futuristic? Or maybe I just hope someday I can get my beard to be that cool.

So I paused an appropriate amount of milliseconds before replying with my “hell yes” message.

Last year was the first iteration of the conference, and I remember reading bits of the blog coverage, and liking the different ideas they had packed into that first version.

I was just listening to Jeff’s podcast with Ken Carroll:

Learning 2.008 Podcast

and am liking even more they ways they are trying to make this a different kind of format, with mixes of un-conference activities, hands on experiences, some Second Life-age, no paper, every session recorded/podcasted, and lots of social interaction. Oh, and they are asking the 8 presenters to do (among the 8 sessions we are supposed to do, is there a theme of “8″?), is to prepare a 7 minute “inspiring” opening session a la Ted Talk style presentations.

Oh, yes, I will pull out Al Gore.

Have I mentioned it is in China? I’ve never been, and just trying to think about an entire nation I know relatively little of is a bit.. well daunting an exhilarating. China…. Shangahai… I dipped into Tag Galaxy for an image taste:

This is all very exciting, because its going to be a swath of new educators I’ve never met before or have not swam in the exact same online circles, plus I am going all the way there to meet people I’ve read via blog but never met, like David Jakes, Ewan McIntosh, David Warlick, Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach , etc.

Have I emphasized this is China? There’s something going on there over the summer, some other gathering. Must be a popular place.

If the conference rings any interest, check it out; it’s on “The” Ning http://learning2cn.ning.com/.

I’ll be there wearing a grin and snapping a bazillion photos. And I ought to take up Ken Carroll’s message in the podcast to get in a few ChinesePod lessons before September.

China!

And even more warming, is that in the replies to my question today, I only know half of the responders. That’s right, people I don’t know are trying to help me!

One pitfall can be squeezing a complex request into 140 characters… i like the thought process of stripping it down to the bare essentials, lose the articles, commas, spelled out “and”s and get clever with abbrvs.

Today’s tweet out was:

Know a youtube-ish sharing site for audio? NMC is sharing collection of loops recorded on Lennon Bus, want site for people to share mixes

My nearly perfect hindsight vision sees now I did not fully explain the need, yet i still got a lot of useful ideas. Here’s the full story. At the NMC Summer Conference recently at Princeton, we had a one day event on the John Lennon Educational Tour Bus, we called Rock Hall 2.0 where we set out 15 minute time slots on our wiki people could reserve to go on the bus and record a sound track, vocal, or anything recordable to be saved as an Apple Sound Loop. The reference to the Rock Hall was referencing the 2006 summer conference in Cleveland, where we had a jam session at the Rock ‘n Roll Hall of Fame — this is the 2.0 version of that, to be cliche.

So after a day, we have nearly 50 loops, some guitar, drums, vocals, and more. Some are really good, and then there are ones like mine that managed about 3 guitar chords. Recording a loop is not trivial for someone w/o good timing, because it has to be perfect in 8 beats so it can be repeatable or pitch shifted.

The idea is we will make these available, and with software like GarageBand or Logic Studio, people can mix and mash the sounds into original music, and then share it back. Providing the loops is the easy end (we’ll make it a download on our web server), what I was looking for is an ideal online site whern people can post, maybe tag, the creations they make from the loops.

i was amazed at the range and number of responses:

And feel compelled to recognize, thank and respond to all!

• D’Arcy suggested Youtubing it as videos with sound and one photo — interesting approach and would be fine if i were doing them, but am not sure many others would go to that length to publish and post.
• @wmrandth (and a few others) suggested Odeo — wow, its been a few years since I looked (and the site did not come up when I tried a few hours ago) – from what I remember it did have tagging built in, but is it reliable?
• This person (he/she, tell me to should check the profile lazy blogger) also suggested anew one called Yodio that allows uploading or calling in via phone of audio and publishing with images. It might have the features, but again, is a bit more than sharing audio. But I like the way it sounds, and it is a new candidate for my 50 Ways to tell a story site.
• @ckendall suggested 3 sites in 2 tweets- Soundsnap, DivShare, and FreeSound – all perhaps viable, but Soundsnao and FreeSound are geared more towards sharing of the loops, not the mixes made of them. Divshare (and others of its ilk) provide the place to upload mixes. A long maybe on that one -but do the files stay there??
• @woscholar recommended PHPMotion, an open source software that allows a web site owner to run their own variety of YouTube but handles other media formats. I’ve been toying with trying out the software, but it feels like a sledgehammer of a tool here when I am looking for a smal pair of pliers.
• @mmkrill pointed at PodSafeAudio certainly is close to being a “YouTube” for mp3s. if it is easy to use and upload, I may take a return peak. A good maybe.
• Chris Millet was another Odeo suggester. I really did like Odeo in the old days. Maybe.
• @rubaiyat voted for ccMixter, which was in my thoughts earlier – it sits there to house mixes of other sounds. I’d be strong on it, but need to look more closely to see how simple/complex the uploading is.
• Lastly (as of 30 minutes ago) miczl, presumably from Australia if i am guessing URLs correctly, provided a whole wiki page of “free” media resources, and yes, looperman looks useful for sharing the loops, but I am still looking for a holding pen for the content created from the loops.

Again, I am bowled over that the response, again from folks I hardly or dont know (yet). As if it needs reinforcement, in twitter, and for that matter, most place in the read/write/mix/publish/rant web, you gotta give to get. Well you don’t have to, but it sure helps a lot.

I am mulling more over the best way to pull together a collection of audio files created from the loops. No one mentioned my first impulse– my response to almost anything is “tag ‘em in del.icio.us”. This would give people the option to get an mp3 on the web through any service where there is a direct link to an mp3, then with a common shared tag, in del.icio.us a tagged MP3 link comes with a free player, so a shared tag would aggregate them. Secondary tags can create a subset, and all the tags come with RSS for free, so the recently tagged audio could be pulled into other sites. And it would not require creating an account at some other site.

The decision is still hanging out there, and I am very sure there are a long list of possible site/tools that might work. I dont know them, but somewhere out there is expertise/experience in the twitter space– when the stars are lined up, you can often just Tweet and Receive (if twitter is not down!)

Al does these fantastic web blogging projects with 3rd grade (or properly Year 3) students at Glenelg School in Adelaid, Australia. For his second year of his miniLegends project (those would be his students, see what they did in 2007), Al is asking for edubloggers to become miniLegend Mentors for this year’s students more or less picking a young blogger and agreeing to reglular comment on their blog.

If you’re an educational blogger of any kind (or visitor) and would like to ‘mentor a mini’ then please leave a comment on THIS page saying who you would like to be connected with. The idea is to drop into their blogs from time to time throughout the year and leave a positive comment . Very simple … why not join in the fun?

How could one resist? And there I was at 2am local time signing up.

I first connected with Al last year via some blog comments and have just been utterly amazed at the wonderful work he is able to do with 8 and 9 year old bloggers and web adventurers (see his Quest Atlantis project). He seems to have an upper hand, or at least some cooperation, at his school, and if you are a K-12 teacher, I am sure the approaches he has done to take care of the concerns of kids “protection” is valuable stuff.

Keep an eye on the miniLegends- and (ahem) if 8 and 9 year old kids can get a handle on becoming effective bloggers, there’s no reason why adults should have any trouble, right?

Personally (and unscientifically) that is many of our own problems as “mature adults”- overwhelmed, we’ve lost the play, sense of wonder, and excitement for life that radiates from an 8 year old. We think too much about what other people will say of us, we over analyze, and we operate from fear rather than curiosity.

Grab it back. Now. Your inner miniLegend is still there.

Hello Alan,

I’ve been reading Cogdogblog and I love the work you are putting out.

My name is Xxxxx xxxxxx. I work with Xxxx XXXXX Xxxx in Xxxxxx, Xxxxx.

I would love the opportunity to chat with you about potential partnership opportunities. We are always looking for new ways to raise awareness and engage new audiences. This could be a great way for us to come together to spread the word about issues we both care about.

:
;
[snip]

It ought to seem genuine. Wow, this person is a long time blog reader? Wow, they are with some cool company in Xxxxxx. Might be my big breal!

Hold the bus!

The writer’s job title is something like “Viral Media Outreach”. Makes me a bit suspicious… Hmm… And yeah, I del.icio.us tagged something from the same outfit just 4 days ago. Is that how long they’ve been CDB readers?

I could be totally wrong and eat crow, but you gott squint at the stuff between and under the lines.

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 found it was tracing back a Technorati link to History Mike’s Musings (who purloined an image link to something buried on this site) and seeing Kyle’s clip as his leading story.

A toast to sweet web serendipity and the dumb luck of clicking out of curiosity.