Meeting Leigh by cogdogblog posted 9 Jul ’08, 1.33pm MDT PST on flickr At the welcome dinner for Horizon.au, I finnaly got to meet in person, Leigh Blackall… now I am more eager to find my way back to New Zealand.

dirty wet rag by norwichforlife posted 11 Apr ’07, 8.26pm MDT PST on flickr norwich state Dispatch for Melbourne Australia, Monday July 7- Just arriving here in Australia has been both exciting and exhausting. I’ve done the long leg flights several times now (LA to Sydney and the marathon, LA to Melbourne) and am glad […]

If the web is at 2.0, then listserv technology must be at a fractional decimal too small to bother writing. I first experienced them around 1988 as a graduate student at Arizona State University- heck it was even before full internet, as my email address was on BITNET. I helped a prof administer a listerv […]

As much as I like to poke fun at twitter’s reliable flakiness and curse the fail whale… For inexplicable reasons, I stay. Again, twitter is not essential. My days go in fine with or without it. What value is it? No… scratch all of that. Twitter just saved me from a huge gaffe. And it […]

CogDogBlog Wordle by cogdogblog posted 1 Jul ’08, 6.26pm MDT PST on flickr Wordle is a way cool visualization tool for making gorgeous tag clouds form text. Like many people, I did the easy thing first- a wordle made from my del.icio.us tags and then played with a not so easy to use tool to […]

Make Fresa Number 1 on the Pet Charts! by cogdogblog posted 1 Jul ’08, 11.28am MDT PST on flickr I got a comment yesterday on a flickr photo of Fresa The Cute Beagle letting me know her photo was part of a contest at Purina! Congratulations, your photo made the Pet Charts for 7/1/2008! Vote […]

From more in the “where would we be without the web” department. I was chatting with a friend about movies, not a subject I can dare seriously enter with series film freaks, but in talking about “obscure” foreign films, I was trying to remember the name of a Russian one I saw a few years […]

I try not to begrudge what others do, but as much as I use (and talk about) mining flickr for creative commons licensed images, I dont know what to make of those who uses a photo sharing site to post photos All Rights Reserved?

Okay, I do begrudge.

But I dont spent much time there- what is more interesting, uplifting, is the magic that happens when you give something away, when you don’t attach statements of what you cannot do with media you’ve created, but attach statements of what you can do. I have pretty much given away every photo, crappy software, document I have ever created.

I gave away a picture of my old car in death valley and got a free music CD. I gave away copies of my old HTML Tutorial, a teacher translated it into Icelandic, and a few years later, I got invited to visit Iceland to do web workshops.

Its not richness of things showered on me that I value, its richness of people I meet, connections made. The more you give, the more you get. Just don’t stand there with your palms out waiting for it.

Recently I had lunch with Jim, a long time friend. He and his wife retired 2 years ago, and they each took up art. I recall Jim asking for photos they could practice from, so I sent my flickr tags for flowers and dogs, etc. I have a nice pencil drawing of good old Mickey (my yellow labrador icon), but Jim showed me some of the lovely pastels his wife has done– see the photo and the painting version below.