Everything that does not have a home, just a big old stinking pile of posts.
To paraphrase an old favorite tongue-twister: A punk sat on a stump. The punk thunk the stump thunk, but the stump thunk the punk stunk My blog hat is humbly dipped to the east to Jim Groom for feverishly launching the spreading EDUPUNK meme (must be in all caps, eh). That photo is scary enough. […]
I’m just back from a 3 day visit to St Paul for the Midwest Library Technology Conference hosted at Macalester College.
This was the first time for this conference, and with attendance well over 250 and from the level of activity I observed, planner Ron Joslin and colleagues should be very pleased. I liked very much how they tried a variety of session formats other than 50 minute lectures (like in the Games in Libraries session we actually got to play some of the games; I might be hooked on Wii bowling after a few rounds).
I should add another noticeable feature of note at the conference was the overt effort to be green sensitive with the amount of paper generated- the program was a singl trifold, double side printed with agenda on one side and map on the other. They asked us to turn in name badges every day to re-use the paper and holders. There were no ugly conference bags stuffed with glossy ads. Its small but commendable.
My NMC colleague Rachel Smith and I were invited to do a keynote on the NMC Horizon Report; as heard this group was interested in exploring/examining emerging technologies. For our session, we took the risk and prepared a presentation in Web 2,0 beta software, the amazing Vuvox Collage (yes its still in beta and sorry no, I dont have beta invites to share.. I just asked them for an account). I was deeply inspired by the Balancing Act presentation shared a few weeks ago by Barbara Ganley, and rolled Collage into my 50 Ways tools with one about Dominoe.
So below is The 2008 Horizon Report: Key Emerging Technologies:
Follow Kokopelli to Starbucks! by cogdogblog posted 27 May ’08, 4.58pm MDT PST on flickr Mesmerized by the sounds of his flute, you order a triple latte venti… again. The World’s Largest Kokopelli pipes his way in Camp Verde, Arizona www.worldslargestthings.com/arizona/kokopelli.htm This one’s for you, my coffee monopoly hating friend. FYI, I marched over to […]
You Are Mere Plankton for a Whale of a Twitter by cogdogblog posted 27 May ’08, 4.05pm MDT PST on flickr So twitter is still borked, but they have spent time changing the graphics that lets you know they are borked. And worse, my fellow plankton — it is now our fault: "Too many tweets!" […]
It registers a Spock-like eyebrow raise when the folks at Mashable.com are wowed by a new tool, so check out Tag Galaxy. This is a visually engaging tool to explore flickr photos by tags. That alone does not say much, but what this site does is create a planetary like display for showing how tags […]
Nings are everywhere. I’m not necessarily writing here about the virtue (or not) of the build your own social network tool. I’m in a few Nings, and technically/design-wise they have come along way from some of the first ones I recall 3 or 4 years ago when they first came out. No, these is a […]
The psychic should know… by designwallah posted 14 Apr ’08, 10.41pm MDT PST on flickr Let’s see if we are on the same page with this fun image….
Twitter has had a recent nasty string of outages, technical gaffs. Ouch, poor little blue birdie. While I have taken my cheap shots at them, I am liking pondering why, in the fickle fast pace high expectations web 2.0 days we live in (and knowing the “we” there is perhaps not all that inclusive of the world at large), that people are staying with it?
The latest one on Saturday, was summarized on the twitter-blog (love how running a Google blog they are putting their tech efforts into their code):
Around 11 am in San Francisco, our main database db006, crashed because of too many connections. We have to put the service into an unscheduled maintenance mode to recover. Folks will see degraded service for the next few hours.
What jumped out at me was the fact that poor db006 (obviously not the database that is shaken, not stirred) is referenced as singular. Reading the comments are plenty of cheap shots like “buy another server dude” or “just hire someone who knows databases”. The one from ‘Phil’ places me in my armchair with a dose of rationality.
So it’s not like they are lounging on the beach while db006 is up in smoke. So why don’t the masses mass elsewhere?
Google’s genesis was in well executed back-end server stuff (those precious search algorithms, they KO-d Altravista, Yahoo, Lycos) and at the time of ad-cluttered busy sites, it’s stark simplicity design of plain text, one colorful logo, on a white background was the antidote to the web status quo. But hey, its 2008, and there is […]
TentCam Originally uploaded by cogdogblog Back in the day when I was a free wheeling no responsibility grad student herein Arizona, I spent a lot of time doing solo backpack trips, especially out in the Superstition Wilderness Area and up on the Mogollon Rim. It sure seemed time to get back to nature, and my […]
