Why? Because I can. The plain text of the last 100 posts….
Yes, another nifty social bookmark service-- Spurl was brought to our attention by Jamie. So it is now part of the others at the Site Submission MultiTool where it is possible to create one browser tool that does the work of 11 others called: FurlDeliciousFrassleConnoteaBagCiteULikeSimpyLinkrollBlogmarksopenBMSpurl Bookmarklet Tool Spurl looks pretty good at a quick glance-- it plays well with del.icio.us in that your tasty del.ici.ous sites can be imported/synched with Spurl, and anything you "Spurl" can be tossed back at del.icio.us. Holy RipMixFeeding! I'm getting dizzy. On another front, it hasn't been the greatest day back from vacation. Our Ocotillo web server was compromised over the weekend and is offline as we re-assemble it from scratch. I had a great Skyperview with Amy Gahran, and my G4 laptop went into a total freeze (like the first time in 5 months) locking up Skype, WireTap, the whole OS... all was trashed. Fortunately, Amy is willing to repeat her remarks tomorrow. Another day... This morning's RSS buzz, or rippling murmur, is the web video from upstart LMS Instructure announcing the open-sourceness of their Canvas platform, and with it, a literal parody of Apple's then ground breaking 1984 video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dCIP3x5mFmw As a frequently off target metaphor users, I step blindly into pot calling kettle black, but is the 1984 really the parallel? Sure Blackboard has a large corner, but they are hardly that dominant, and frankly, seem to be teetering unaware of the sign taped on their back "Kick Me, I am Obsolete". I did like the use of flame throwers in the Instructure video, even the fun out takes at the end, looking like they had some fun there. But if you want a real message, listen to this clip from perhaps the most memorable NMC presentation we hosted when doing our conferences in Second Life. This was Jim Groom and Tom Woodward titled The Revolution will be Syndicated: The coming revolution will be syndicated through a web of feeds making ideas ever easier to find. Sharing will no longer be the exception, but the rule. Enduring these hard, transitional times takes not only a revolutionary mindset, but the resourcefulness of a survivalist, therefore the methods we will examine are not only mind altering, but they are also very cheap, flexible, and open. This presentation will involve some performance art in an effort to "revolutionize" how we imagine web-based publishing in higher education. Come to this session ready to doff the chains of LMS slavery and join the brave new world of web-publishing in the Age of Syndication. Check out the opening-- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1nZxxksVqpQ Jim and Tom had cast the vision of LMS zombies on the train, LMS zombies eating at McDonalds (maybe LMS zombies suing each other in court)-- in Tom Woodward's epic line describing LMS's "like artery clogging document warehouses where engagement goes to die." Their theatric pyrotechnics suggested that LMS zombies sit among us, at meetings, in the hallways, in the classrooms-- now that was some flamethrowing (even if was cheap tricks in Second Life). You can get the whole video and more at http://www.nmc.org/preso/6438 This was back in November 2008, and honestly, it is sure looking like burned zombie flesh when I look at what is bubbling over at ds106, Jim's open digital storytelling course- which, among other such open courses- is the least "course-ish" thing out there. It is barely 2 weeks in and there have already been about 700 blog contributions. To those who doubt the ability for ordinary learners to become "system administrators", look at how many of them are adorning their digital lockers. We think usually of revolutionaries as the building burning, flag stomping radicals with the bull horns, but often the real revolution happens within, and not with the fanfare of flamethrowers. And that is no secret. 91%How Addicted to Blogging Are You?Mingle2 - mingle Thanks to Rob (linktribution), I have exact data on the problem. My blogging here has been sporadic due to blogging directed elsewhere... After our week long conference held in Second Life (I hear you snickering out there)... I was blogged out having tried to blog the summaries of events over at the NMC Campus Observer, at least the 9 hours worth of a 12 hour schedule per day I was present. It was another 2 days of catch up, editing recorded audio, syncing a few slideshare sessions, pushing about 500 images to flickr... Yes, whether you nod with Forbes.com that everyone in Second Life is a loser or sweep broadly with brush strokes that it's "just cyber sex and gambling", we feel it is important to actually give this environment a good run before dismissing it so candidly. So we ran eight days of activities-- and in contrast to many conferences, 9 out of 10 sessions were active, with people participating in activities, making things- almost no mumbling over slideshows. Rather than just taking polarized stance on the value of voice chat (technology which just became final days before the event), we used it extensively, and found it to be a mixed bag of blessings and downsides- when it worked, it was valuable- it opened up communication channels, and in most sessions at most 1-2 people could not get it to at least a point where they could hear. At the same time, we realize it is not fair to assume everyone present has the ability to hear audio-- but it does not translate into abandoning voice communication. There was significant emergent behaviors, such as several times where people spontaneously started transcribing in chat if it became clear that an audience member could not hear the audio. There was a sense of "play" here at the same time we covered serious topics, and at every session I detected a level of energy far beyond what you get in those beige hotel session rooms, nestled in those tight rows. And when you hear feedback like: Lttle did I know when I took a week's vacation to attend I would be entering a new world that would put me in creative overdrive, make me stop and ponder my life's goals, and open my eyes to the possibilities of a whole new direction I would never have dreamed. I was already excited about SL and the possibilities.. I'm taking the red pill tonight, no problem! I say there is something there there. This feeds into a theme I have had the last few months, where I get a bit riled when I come across sweeping generalizations applied to rather complex diverse systems, mainyl web technologies, but more broadly, networked environments. How can anyone truly ascertain that X technology is universally Y? Who really has that kind if breadth of experience to survey something that is on a daily expansion growth? But I digressed from the start of this post... Blog addiction? Does it lead to harder stuff? Is there a program? I think i can stop.... and I will... for tonight... well, for the next hour.. maybe.... Today was the day seven years ago my grandmother passed away. When exactly she was born (sometime in 1905) is a matter of fuzzy record, as she herself told, as her birth into a family of 7 siblings raised by her father in Newark, New Jersey was certified more 50 years later through research into the census records, so it was celebrated on October 15. "Granny" as I kiddingly called her, was always special to me- she had lots of spirit, drove fast in her red Rambler ("I don't want anyone behind me complaining about being stuck behind an old lady"), took me to see Johnny Unitas and the Colts play in Memorial Stadium, and was always keen to go jump the big waves at Ocean City, MD. I had also kidded her about she had to stick around til she was at least 100- she did not make it, but got very close. I always loved hearing her stories about growing up in the early 1900s, her father the chess champion, learning to drive in a Model T, etc. https://flickr.com/photos/cogdog/3183321081 Granny's Tape flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) During a 1994 visit back east, at a stop at my sister Harriet's house, I decided to capture some of the stories on this vintage micro-cassette, which I've been hanging onto, although the recorder/player stopped working. So this year, I invested a whopping $19 to buy a new micro-cassette player so I could digitize the tapes, which I have as about 35 minutes of digital audio. When I visited my Mom in April, I managed to scan a lot of old photos, and combined with ones my sister provided (and a few representational ones snagged from the net), I have been planning to turn it into a digital story. Woah, Neo, this is going to take more time than I thought. I've gotten through 2 of 13 tracks, and even with trimming, it was a few hours to come up with this 6 minute segment doing some really basic editing in the old iMovie. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9PWjClHvO88 And once this is done, Mom, you are next- I have an hour of your recordings and a pile of photos! But this one's for you, Granny, Happy Birthday. Featured Image: https://flickr.com/photos/cogdog/3226496664 2009/365/26: Granny (1986) flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) There's a lot of dark writing about the state of the internet. Those links are just by people I know. Through the internet. And then there is this guy, who I don't know, who is offering, and suggesting the folks who were around when the Wizards Stayed Up Late, should all in unison declare "We Were Wrong": For the last twenty years, I believed the internet prophets of old. I worshipped at the altar of Stewart Brand and Kevin Kelly. I believed that the world would be a better place if everyone had a voice. I believed that the world would be a better place if we all had no secrets. But so far, the evidence points to an escapable conclusion: we were all wrong. : : It’s quite easy to see the differences between the internet world we live in and the utopia we were promised. And a fair measure of that is because we didn’t actually make it to the utopia. I can't speak for him, but he does not speak for me-- I never had an expectation nor dream that the internet would be utopia. I find utopias not only a ridiculous goal, would we ever get there it would be insanely dull. Utopias never happen, dude. They are a bad idea in themselves. But I don't have anything to counter this dark cloud. If I were to mount my unicorn, jump over a rainbow, and offer the same optimism many of those folks, and I, might have expressed in the 1990s, I too would launch a few torpedos my way. It's not, and never has been, all good and wholesome and fair for all. But, that also means, that it cannot be totally shit across the stratum. All I have are tiny anecdotes. Last week I got a message via flickr: Dear Mr Levine: Your pictures on Flickr are very good. Beautiful compositions and interesting places. I used one of them with attribution and link to your Flickr account on my site which promotes the U.S. overseas. It is in Polish. Here is the address: www.ameriguide.pl/guide/usa/arizona/arizona-regions/north-central/camp-verde I hope you will not have anything against it. Thank you. I never have anything against this. There are over 59,000 photos I have posted to flickr, all available for anyone to use, all placed in the public domain (well ost, flickr never has been able to batch convert all my photos, some are still Creative Commons CC-BY). But I am curious, I know I have taken photos in Camp Verde (a small town about 40 minutes from where I live, not a huge mecca for anything). There is is, a web site guide to this small town, and I recognize my photo. It's all about this small town Camp Verde, dawny obóz wojskowy z czasów wojen z Indianami, jest dzi? jednym z najcz??ciej odwiedzanych miejsc w tej cz??ci Arizony. Dzi?ki po?o?eniu na ruchliwej autostradzie I-17, nieca?? godzin? jazdy samochodem z Flagstaff i tyle samo z Phoenix, 30 mil na po?udnie od Sedony, 15 od Cottonwood i Clarkdale i 20 od Jerome sprawia, ?e miasteczko jest naturalnym przystankiem dla setek tysi?cy przeje?d?aj?cych t?dy podró?nych (Zobacz map?). IN POLISH. An entire web site about America, published in Polish. The tag line under the big image? O Ameryce napisano miliony ksi??ek i nakr?cono niesko?czon? ilo?? filmów, od westernów po komedie i historie mafii, a mimo to reszta ?wiata wci?? wie o niej zadziwiaj?co niewiele. If I can trust Google's translation it's an interesting phrasing (well I do have a colleague who lives in Warsaw I could ask, Hi Kamil) (Someone I met because of both our work being on the Internet). About America, millions of books have been written and an endless number of films have been filmed, from westerns to comedies and mafia stories, and yet the rest of the world still knows astonishingly little about it. This ought to be our country's new tagline, the heck about greatness, the people in Poland think we are pretty great. So that guy who really wanted the internet pioneers to apologize, or maybe to never have gone ahead with what they did? We might have some kind of network managed, created, controlled by private enterprises. I doubt in that internet that some people in Poland would create an information resource for travelers to America, offered for free, using media openly shared by people they don't know. I don't see much to be hopeful for in the large corporations who manage a lot of our online experience. I don't see much to be hopeful for in the monitoring/management by our government, considering the FCC has signed over everything to the folks in the first sentence. The places I see are in the efforts of the people down at the human level, the individuals who get an itch to create, or to share something for others, the folks that create weird corners of the internet just because they get an itch. I see much less shit in those corners, it's piled high in the middle of the room. And speaking of weird corners... the photo of mine the Ameriguide people in Poland chose? [caption width="640" align="aligncenter"]Camp Verde Arizona's Big Attraction... flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0)[/caption] Why Camp Verde, Arizona is home to the World's Largest Kokopelli. As if you knew there was such a thing. Keep the Internet Weird, and influence by individual weirdos. My kind of folk. Featured Image: Pixabay photo by aitoff shared into the public domain using Creative Commons CC0 I spent maybe another hour last night adding a few more minutes of audio recorded with my grandmother in 1994 to TapeWrite. I added a bit of introduction to the recording. This follows my description of the series My Grandmother's Stories, from Audio Tape to TapeWrite and Episode 1: Growing Up in Newark. In Episode 2, my sister and I ask her for details of how she met her husband, Abraham... TW He died before I was born, and I am named after him, so everything I know about him is from old papers, stuff I might remember my parents saying, and this recording. The photos I have of them are more from their later years. I am enjoying the process of adding the "cards" to TapeWrite. It's different from doing video, where you are trying to illustrate the story, here I look for references that are related (like an old image of Atlantic City when she mentions going there for a honeymoon), the few pictures I have. I also mix in a few quotes too. The idea of the cards are partly to illustrate, but also to put key markers in the timeline, it lets people jump from segment to segment, so might be considered some kind of annotation. I'm trying to find a method as I experiment. I have not found a way to group these stories, maybe it;s a feature I am missing. I added a tag grannystories to them all but did not find a public URL. The public profile for my "tapes" does not display tags, and there is some feature to make playlists, but my hunch is those are for viewers, not publishers. I might have to ask Borja what I am missing. I did forget an image, she said in her last letter to me that she included a valentine card from Abraham: : If I had to do it over again, I would have married you sooner, Dad Okay, I think it's weird that her husband signed a card "Dad" but past that, it's a lovely sentiment. Then again, in this audio, I took note that she got married when she was only 17, and met him when he was 14. That seems pretty early as is, Abraham! My favorite thing is that last letter she sent me, where the only thing she had to write on was a page ripped out of an address book, at age 94: [caption id="attachment_60192" align="aligncenter" width="540"] My grandmother's last hand written note to me, ~1999[/caption] Dear Alan, I have no stationary so I am improvale [improvising?] with what I have. Am ok, healthful, for an old lady age 94. Thought you would like the pics. Copy them and return. Love, Granny. I so much love that she signed this "granny" because it was my teasing nickname I would call her. I would tell her how "spunky" she was. But the fact that at 94, she wanted her pictures returned, says she had plans to live a lot longer. She did another 4 years. That's my spunky granny. Top / Featured Image: Collage of photos of my grandfather, Abraham, and grandmother, Jeannette, at their Baltimore home in 1955. Personal photos, but hey, because it's how I roll, they are licensed Creative Commons BY. Thanks to some good feedback from suers, I've been able to make some needed corrections to our Feed2JS (RSS Feeds rendered via JavaScript). Like a Homer Simpson Doh! slap across the forehead, I realized that while I was faithfully adding to the main page's history, it certainly could use an RSS Feed to publish news of its updates. Now it is there: http://feed2js.org/content/feed2js.xml But a story behind the story. I could have sat down and hand edited an XML file. I've done it before. But that is a pain, and getting the dates in the right format is a double pain. So my conniving scheme was to use MovableType as a cheap tool for posting new history links as well as auto generating the feed. It is a simple blog with no web site itself, and no archives- in fact it exists to publish 3 things- the content file used for the main page (s text file with merely everything on the page that is not header, navigation, and footer). This entire site is one PHP file and a directory of content files that are popped into the template. Just for grins, my updates now have comments available (keep those cards and spam coming). The "blog entries" are the 3 most recent items that are listed as bullets at the bottom under "Updates". The rest of the "blog" entries are spit itnot another content file for the "history" page (all entries after the 3 most recent), and the RSS feed. So now, when I make an update to my code, I merely publish a new entry to the mini blog, and it updates the necessary parts of the site. This is even faster then the older method of manual editing of the content files. Using ecto took me about 30 minutes to post the 20 or so entries needed to fill it out. If you can grasp what blog software can publish, if you can wrestle and mostly master the templates, then you can exploit it to do all kinds of web publishing tasks- not your average blog. Ho hum. From the far seeing "FutureTech" at ABCNews.com, they reveal Web Tech to Keep Users Up-to-Date on News!!!! Maybe I ought to look at this RSS stuff ;-) Now it is easy to lambast a rather feather-weight overview of RSS, and frankly it is good to see more of this in the media, but c'mon. The author completely missed the vital role of weblogs in generating a large portion of the RSS content out there, and the value of personal publishing tools. Instead, we hear more of the gack about RSS killing email (hardly) or how one clever firm hired a programmer to get its full newsletter inside a feed. Hee hee, keep quiet Mr Barnum. Of course, over at ABCNews.com you can poke your way through all the ads, graphical banners, logis, a 1 page article spread over 3 bloated web pages and find nary a feed here. Right there on the front page is a snippet that is certainly something that should be inside an <item><description> tag. Hardly future tech. The future is here, just not distributed at all at ABC... How much history do we know of the exact place we live? What was going on at the place your home is sitting, say 100, 200 years ago? We literally walk around on hidden histories, not seeing, not even knowing them. Through an unexpected series of events, tonight I found myself for maybe 2 or 3 hours, scraping and poking around the internet seeking to find the hidden history beneath my childhood home. https://twitter.com/cogdog/status/766138285018144768 This started at Kate Bowle's US/Not us blog post about last week's Digital Pedagogy Lab Institute at the University of Mary Washington. Kate mused on not knowing about Fredericksburg, then looking it up, then finding it was "that" Fredericksburg in terms of being the site of Civil War battles. That triggered my own memories of the months I lived there in 2012, I could walk a few blocks up Marye Road and turn on Sunken Road (the same road that is a margin of the UMW campus) and walk along a wall that provided shelter to Confederate artillery. [caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="640"] flickr photo shared by cogdogblog under a Creative Commons ( BY ) license[/caption] In Fredericksburg you cannot help but stub your toe on something related to the Civil War. That triggered my memory of where I grew up just outside the top left corner of Baltimore: The home in Baltimore where I grew up was on land that was part of a plantation that most likely owned slaves. This invisible history lies where I rode my bicycle and played baseball. A wooded lot one block away from my home was rumored to be the place where a few slaves were buried who fought for the Union. It held some amount of haunted fear, I never was brave enough to go look. On a last visit to my old neighborhood, I noted a newer house was on that corner. Hmmm. There is quite a bit of conjecture here. Yes, I can remember the corner lot that was wooded and nothing built on it, in the middle fi a densely built out suburb. There was a story that on that lot was a place where a few slaves who fought in the Civil War were buried. Supposedly they were unmarked except one. This was a neighborhood story, and I actually never even ventured onto the lot, no Stephen King curiosity of a dead body. Maybe it was fear of graveyards? I was a dorky kid. I wish I was more curious. And even more curious when the last time I drove through the old neighborhood (2008?) that there was a newish house sitting on that lot, the trees trimmed back, just another suburban house. Built on a place that, if my neighborhood story was correct, was a graveyard. Maryland in the time around the Civil Was was a mix of free blacks and slaves, so I have no sure reason to assume the story, if it were true, was about slaves who fought in the civil war (my story nowhere as powerful as Michelle Obama's). This lot was one street away from mine, maybe 3 houses between it and mine. What was this land like 100+ years before I was riding my bike around on it or playing tag in the woods? While in the 1960s and 1970s it was on the edge of the city of Baltimore, in the mid 19th century, this was rather far out in the country. How could I even find more information? Hello internet. My first idea was thinking about Pahl's Farm. While we did live the burbs, in the middle of it was the remnants of an old family farm that still grew and sold fresh produce. In the summer my Mom would send me out with a buck or 2 to walk up to the old stand (it was right across from my junior high school) to pick up ears of fresh corn. In 1972 some bad kids lit the wooden stand on fire (they rebuilt a modern block building in it's place, still standing there). According to the farm's website, the farm land was in its 6th century of family operation, going back to the mid 1880s when it was established by German immigrant Peter Gompf, So one question I pursued was trying to find a map of Gompf's land, to see if my old home was part of that farm. I went down some fascinating tangents about Sudbrook Park, the area of larger victorian homes just north of Milford Mill Road from where I grew up. Now this place has some well established history: In the 1850s, prominent Baltimorean James Howard McHenry (1820-1888), grandson of the famous statesman James McHenry and the Revolutionary War hero Col. John Eager Howard, purchased over 850 acres of land in Pikesville and named his estate "Sudbrook." At that time, the only way to travel the eight miles into Baltimore City was by horse and carriage over bumpy dirt roads, a problem McHenry eventually solved by securing train service through his property in the 1870s. With transportation in place, McHenry actively sought to develop his Sudbrook estate as a "suburban village," a concept in its earliest infancy. McHenry hired Frederick Law Olmsted, Sr (yes that one) to design Sudbrook Park -- it never got built as planned, but did become a rather stately neighborhood. One if it's distinguishing featured was an old one lane wooden bridge over the railroad tracks. [caption id="attachment_60563" align="aligncenter" width="630"] Creative Commons license image from Wikimedia Commons[/caption] I wondered if McHenry's land extended south of Milford Mill Road. I then began looking for historic maps of Baltimore County- finding the ones published by GM Hopkins in 1877 (about the era I was looking for). The first site I looked at was a genealogy site and while I could scan the maps, they were covered with watermarks and available only for sale. Plus they did not have the map of the third district of the county where my old house would be located. Luckily I found the Johns Hopkins University Jscholarship Site">full set of maps at the Johns Hopkins University Library's JScholarship site. I spent some time trying, not succeeding in overlaying a modern Google Maps atop the old maps. I was able to find the spot mostly by matching the patterns of the creeks- Gwynn's Falls (which flooded the bridge on Buckingham Road in 1972's Hurricane Agnes). [caption id="attachment_60564" align="aligncenter" width="630"] My best guess at locations on this 1877 map of my childhood neighborhood[/caption] The railroad on the map lines up with the current location of the tracks now used by the Metro. I could see where Scotts Level Creek emptied into Gwynn Oak Creek, which is right near the intersection of Milford Mill Road and the 695. Milford Mill Road, was also easy to match, and the old Mill (near my highs school of the same name) is shown. And the property of Gumpf's farm is shown. The roads are not identified (they were just dirt tracks), but my hunch is that Bedford Road is near the one shown on the map and that Campfield Road, my street maybe was an old one shown on the map. If my guess is right, the location of the possible cemetery is on on land labeled "G.N. and C.H. Moule." And what about that house? Google maps got me an address. I was able to look up its title and parcel information from the SDAT web site , and something that is key, a "plat" number. I saw that it was built in 1988. I had to create an account on the Maryland Land and Record's site, and made some lucky guesses with an arcane search tool that seemed to look more for court IDs. But there was a form that took the plat numbers, and I got a screen of property references in no particular order. I did a page search on the street name, but hit nothing, but on a whim, I tried the development name of "Villa Nova"- and got 2 hits from the early 1980s. I finally found some kind of paperwork related to subdividing the lot, back in 1982: It did not really tell me much, and now I am thinking I've gone as far as I could. Tonight. The thing is- IF the neighborhood story is true, and IF this house was built in the 1980s, then some kind of archaeological survey would have been done, and perhaps even the graves moved. There should be a record of that somewhere. I might have to put up a bat signal for a librarian. This is also way past the point where I wonder why I am fixated on this. But still, the back yard where I played as a kid-- what was that like in the 1860s? Was it dense forest? Was it cultivated fields? By who? These hidden histories are right beneath out feet. It might take some scratching to et below the surface, but whatever you find should be interesting. Top / Featured Image: Third District map of Baltimore County from Atlas of Baltimore County, Maryland 1877 (Hopkins G.M) found at the Johns Hopkins University Jscholarship Site. The maps is published there under a non-exclusive rights agreement: a royalty free, non-exclusive worldwide license to use, re-use, display, distribute, transmit, publish, re-publish or copy the Materials, either digitally or in print, or in any other medium, now or hereafter known, for the purpose of including the Materials hereby licensed in the collection of materials in the Johns Hopkins Digital Repository for educational use worldwide ... This license shall not authorize the commercial use of the Materials by Johns Hopkins or any other person or organization, but such Materials shall be restricted to non-profit educational use. That's me, non-profit educational use. The feed cat is coming out of the bag. A few weeks ago I bought a domain, and with some hosting donated by Aaron at Modevia Web Services, the Feed2JS service that lives now at http://feed2js.org/ has its own home at http://feed2js.org/. All I've done is more or less move the current site in whole, made a few edits, and set it up for some stress test. What does it mean? If you want to give it a try, this new server is going to be watched over and given technical support if needed. All you need to do is to either rebuild your cut and paste feed code or simply edit your JavaScript to replace the 2 occurrences of http://feed2js.org/ with http://feed2js.org/ I am not making any changes yet at the Maricopa server, but likely within a week or so, my access to it will vanish. If all goes well over the next few days, and it is time to throw the switch, I will most likely leave on the Maricopa site a web re-direct, so all requests to the old server will automatically be forwarded to the new. You can still download the source code from the new site, which many people already have done-- not to be charitable and be a public mirror, but just to run their own code, so their site is not hung out to dry if the remote server goes belly up. There are thousands of others that are running their own server. I have done it myself in a number of sites where having a local version makes sense. This is an interim plan. I am still mulling over how to reconstruct the code logic to do the feed fetching asynchronously, and having options for designating alternative sites. Call it Feed2JS 2.0 if you need a buzzword. Anyone interested in helping wrangle the new code with me? I'm ready to pop the source code on a Forge site. But first, let's see what happens when 13,000 requests per day start swimming to the new site... cc licensed ( BY NC ND ) flickr photo shared by Alissa Osumi Expectations keep piling up in the apartment of my mind Like piles of someone elses dirty clothes. Dirty jeans, socks in odd numbered collections, flannel shirts, a polka dotted party dress (not mine), torn jeans, a tuxedo (no way), a leisure suit (maybe). I keep stuffing them back in the closet, tossing over the balcony at night, leaving them in front of the empty 4G unit. AC/DC Concert t-shirts, black bikini, wrinkled travel slacks. Wedding gown (used once), surfer shorts (used too much), cowboy duds, napkins, towels, boxer shorts with cartoons. Big plastic bagfulls I drop in the Goodwill dumpster. Some of that stuff might just be my size. Here is another one of those small winding internet trails I found myself on without anticipating of it. Back of the mind, this leads me to wonder about highly structured learning __________ systems, where everything is precisely detailed and specified, and leaves no room for wandering off trail. But that's another post. Or not. This is about podcasts, listening lists of them. I think it was Dean Shareski who tweet asked about what education podcasts people listen to. Jim Stauffer listed two of my usual suspects, feeds in my player. https://twitter.com/xb7r/status/1455357678847397894 Thinking that a lot of people will give similar lists, I decided to toss a conversation bomb, given than I just blogged something about often getting ideas about education that was not specifically Educators Sitting Around Talking About Education. https://twitter.com/cogdog/status/1455363003646414848 And this is where I find that you get something bby at least being in the flow and adding something to the mix. Bonni Stachowiak, who prolifically produces the mentioned Teaching in Higher Education podcasted, came in with a reply with both a valuable suggestion but even more. https://twitter.com/bonni208/status/1455367976278888452 No, I had never heard of Scene on Radio... but now I have, and subscribed. Here is also a reason I love the Overcast app, besides the lack of me cussing about getting Apple's own app set up, is that I can tell it to give me episodes from oldest first, so I can listen from Season 1 on. This is all stuff I could have just tweeted, but then again, I have a blog, and I can let my mind wander. I had always admired or been overwhelmed the massive podcast lists blogged by my friend Bryan Alexander, like his 2021 list (he even used one of my photos). So I was glad that Bonni referenced Bryan's habit in her own shared list of favorites for 2021 (having done something like his back to 2014), I counted 48 shows! And she even bravely tried to winnow them down to a top 10. Whew! That as a habit has immense value more than the sharing of the listens, it creates your own arc of listening over time. I can also not help to wonder how they listen so much! But that is the beauty of this media form, it being really the only one I know of that you can partake of with attention, while doing something else. Myself, I only listen while driving to town and back on errands, and of course if I am driving with Cori, we are talking to each other. Having moved closer to town in February, this is maybe 25 minutes each direction. I really do not find I listen at home. If I am outside working on things, I prefer focusing on them, or enjoying the scenery (a perk of not living in an urban/suburban setting!). All of which boils down to me having maybe 10 shows in the podcast player, not at all a giant list I am going to brag about. And this does include Bonni's Teaching in Higher Education, Terry Greene's Gettin' Air (cause Terry is a friend), plus the Check the OL one Terry does with Anne-Marie Scott, and I have Tim Carson's Praxis Pedagogy because... well heck, Tim had me on the show once. I guess that makes it 40% education topics. The rest are more of the type I like because they are about other things, yet I invariably find something of interest, or something that kindles an interest. A few are just the ones I started using as examples when teaching audio production and digital storytelling. These include: This American Life (TAL) is the big daddy, the show that always establishes and hones the storytelling format. If I had only one to listen to, this would be it. And for bonus, I went to the same high school in Baltimore that Ira Glass attended (I was a bit later, so he never pushed me around in the hallway).99% Invisible is close in style but nearly always grabs me with interest with topics I never considered, and about the world around us. For just a few recent gems, the Pink Margarine episode (I never knew there were butter historians) or the Lows of High Tech, a look at the design of artificial limbs. These shows, like TAL always start rooted in someone's personal experience. Radiolab - Another go to when I taught audio, for Jad Abumrad's classic on how radio creates empathy. Their rapid audio style zips by before you stop to wonder how the heck they do something so rapid paced and multileveled. Along with TAL and The Truth (below) this was one of the three shows I suggested as listening exercises to understand the radio drama form in DS106 (still there in the open course version I last touched in maybe 2014). I used a cut from a show on Detective Stories to post in SoundCloud (likely a copyright no no) with comments attached to specific parts demonstrating an audio technique. I had dropped this from the player a while ago, so I look forward to catching up.The Truth - "movies for your ears" is maybe atop any list I would create because they are dark Twilight Zone style shows with unexpected twists that just exhibit good writing and sound production. It was Zoe Butterfly that sent me down the road of blogging about The Truth About Education (and Butterflies) (and Podcasts). There was Robocalls that was totally centered on a telephone. But an all time favorite was the first episode I ever heard, Moon GraffitiSong Exploder is just a concept I cannot let go. A finished album recorded ong is broken down track by track to let he author describe its origin, how it was built track by track. There is a rich metaphor here for the creative process, that there is something so valuable about thinking of and creating of media by its layers but also the difference between a finished product (like a presentation or a class project) and all of the layers and events that went into it. I played out a few times as a metaphor that gets to the role of that cave person era act of blogging or even an example of Class Exploder to break down an assignment layer by layer to understand how it was made. But see, I ventured off track here. I like the show also because I end up learning about a lot of genres of music I would not typically listen to (synth pop, rap, etc). That alone is valuable.Twenty Thousand Hertz ("The stories behind the world's most recognizable and interesting sounds") is much like 99%Invisible but all about the design and nuance of sound and things we might encounter often but never consider what went into them. Listening to the Movies was one of a three part series on how sound aids for people with limited or no visual ability, I did not even know of this entire realm of movies being audio annotated. The Windsor Hum was a followup to an earlier episode that now explains the mysterious deep humming heard in the city of Windsor, Ontario. And Domestic Symphony covered the world of audio design of... appliances (and I agree that the sounds from my LG dishwasher are downright annoying). And now I am adding to this list, thanks to this whole series of clicks and ticks, Scene to Radio. A summary might have to wait until next year. All of this is to say that (and no offense to my education podcasting friends) that there's a lot to be said for listening to a variety of shows. Even if you only subscribe to a puny 10, there's so much potential if you mix it up. There's going to be almost an entire ocean of other things I ought to listen to. But there's time to discover or fall into them. Featured Image: Mine! https://flickr.com/photos/cogdog/8231139257 Aiming To Listen to The Stars flickr photo by cogdogblog shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license Holy _____! Over at Open Artifact, Randy Brown has neatly sewn together a neat package: phpWiki inside and integrated with his new WordPress blog, so it more or less operates as a cohesive site and sharing the WP database. It addresses some of the issues of trying to tie into wikis which typically have their own rather stark interface and contextually void navigation. I now have a wiki which makes use of the existing CSS rules I use within WordPress; it fits nicely within that interface container. ewiki makes use of one table and it is housed within the WordPress database. With some additional mods to the underlying PHP, it should be capable to create a tight integration between both wiki and weblog functionality; making use of the same user authentication scheme is the first need which comes to mind. The new features, add-ons, and ideas popping out in WordPress (and no plans or desires to pay for MT3, goodbye soon...), has me thinking about what I'll be tinkering with in July and August.. Thanks to Marlene from Adelaide for locating what may be the ancestral grounds of CogDogBlog- a place called Cobdogla. With a population of 273 Cobdoglians, this place is described: The tongue-twistingly named Cobdogla (an Aboriginal word meaning "land of plenty") has a fascinating history. Much of the land hereabouts "“ from west of Overland Corner right through into New South Wales "“ was taken up under a pastoral lease in 1846 by John Chambers, who raised purebred horses for the police and military. The Cobdogla Irrigation and Steam Museum houses the impressive Humphrey pump, the only working model of its kind in the world. It's gas-driven and fed by water from Joiner's Lagoon near the site of the original Cobdogla Station Homestead. You can also take a ride on Margaret the Steam Train. If you are curious as to the location, here's yer Google Map: View Larger Map I regret to tell my Cobdoglian friends I did not get to visit on my recent trip in the Aussie neighborhood. Next time? I don't need in-flight entertainment on a digital screen. On a flight from Phoenix to Seattle today (and on to Vancouver), seated in 30F, the window shade is up. My head is pressed against the window like a kid on his first flight ever. Other passengers are looking at device screens, books, sleeping, and nearly all of them are missing this show. With a late afternoon flight, I chose my seat specifically on the right (facing east), for optimal lighting from the west. When I fly over an unfamiliar place, I enjoy just looking at the land features. Mountains. Mesas. Canyons. Rivers. Islands. The size and shapes of towns. Road patterns. Circles marking field irrigation. But flying in and out of Phoenix, 95% of the time the view is perfectly clear, the earth laid out like the biggest relief map. I love studying the detail and matching what I see to where I have been. This experience changes when I can recognize things. [caption width="640" align="aligncenter"]flickr photo shared by cogdogblog under a Creative Commons ( BY ) license[/caption] Taking off to the west from Sky Harbor Airport, I spot the bumps of Papago Park, the high rises in the tiny clump that is downtown Phoenix, the sports arena and ballpark downtown, Grand Avenue cutting diagonally northwest in defiance of the east-west / north-south grid of the city. The green of Encanto park. I see the zig zag line of the western canal, miraculously moving water a hundred miles from where it was diverted from the Sat River. Camelback Mountain, in the middle of the city, where once I got married on top, seems puny. There are the mountains of the Phoenix Preserve, North Mountain with antennae, I think I spot the location of my friend Coop's house. The suburban development spreads like a long roll of fabric, past Cave Creek, then out over a giant patch that is Anthem, a community of 50,000 that did not even exist when I moved here in 1989. I can spot to the east Horseshoe and Bartlett Reservoirs, places I once rode to see by my bicycle, and farther beyond the green ribbon of the Verde River, an anomaly in the desert. Then we are over the heavily corrugated country north of Phoenix, hardly any sign of habitation. Unless you focus. Then you see isolated ranches, dirt roads. Bigger mountains, and I trace the meanders of the Verde River and where Sycamore Creek meets it. The town I spot is Cottonwood where I remember the times visiting my friend Todd, who recently moved to Seattle. The distinctive jagged cliffs and canyons around Sedona poke up, places I have hiked, camped, mountain biked. There are the energy vortices I never felt. I can pick the scenic road up Oak Creek Canyon, the views my Mom missed because she had her eyes closed. This is the edge of the Colorado Plateau, with a table cloth of green pine trees. It looks deceptively flat from this height. It's easy then to see Flagstaff, the San Francisco Peaks (highest point in the state, I've stood there). Flagstaff, where I live the summer of 1990 (as a Geology grad student working at the US Geological Survey) and in 2000 for my sabbatical from the Maricopa Community Colleges. The density of memories there is as easy to spot as the shape of the city. [caption width="640" align="aligncenter"]flickr photo shared by cogdogblog under a Creative Commons ( BY ) license[/caption] The again more wide open space. Bumpy volcanic hills, read rock cliffs. And... a giant gash, catching the setting sun, the cliff layers of Geologic time revealed in the Grand Canyon. While awesome at this site, nothing, nothing, no beautiful photo can come close to matching that soul engulfing experience of standing on its edge, and seeing person dwarfing immensity of space and time. The memories come like the flow of the Colorado, the churning machine of water seeking the sea that loses all sense of scale from the top. I think of hikes there, backpacks in the winter with my Geology buddy Tom, the 10 day raft trip, doing a Rim to Rim overnight in the hottest part of the year, a dreadful night of neat hypothermia with my stepson Travis, the weird run in with a creationist while camping on the remote north side area of Vulcan's Throne. My mind wanders some, I lose track of my landmarks. My guess is it's somewhere over the unwanted desert land of western Nevada and Eastern California, remembering my long road trips through there as a graduate students driving to my field research area outside of Bishop California. I remember driving through Death Valley once in summer, at 5am it was 105°. And one time coming the other way I sped through the valley trying to reach the end of the valley before a dust storm (it was a tie). [caption width="640" align="aligncenter"]flickr photo shared by cogdogblog under a Creative Commons ( BY ) license[/caption] Taking a photo of my 1973 Ford Maverick at 130 feet below Sea Level, a photo eventually part of one of my Amazing Stories. Even in this remote desert / mountain terrain, you cannot help but see signs of human activity. Not much, but I pick out roads, patches of solar energy panels, mining scars, dead straight lines of transmission lines. Somewhere ahead on this route, because I have flown it before, we will cross over the Sierra Nevada and Long Valley where I did my field research almost 30 years ago. Hang in there, here comes the metaphor. I love this experience of matching my experiences to the terrain, connecting place to time. The terrain, the view, the map, is not my memory. It jogs memory, or looking at the land causes me to reach back and toss a few more neural ties to those memories. I might be fairly sure I am seeing the town of Jerome, but even if not exact, the process of trying to do that, to me, reconnects the memories. And I wrote this in just a text editor, no access to the internet to look up place names, to place check against Google maps. The only information sources I have is the window and my mind. I had been thinking of this in light of a talk by Audrey Watters about the pitfalls of memory machines. And at this point, I may not remember well the context of her remarks (those I will look up later and link, like this next quote). Audrey makes the case that "human memory is not data storage": One of the problems with this latest information technology is that we use the word “memory,” a biological mechanism, to describe data storage. We use the word in such a way that suggests computer memory and human memory are the same sort of process, system, infrastructure, architecture. They are not. But nor are either human or computer memory quite the same as some previous information technologies, those to which we’ve outsourced our “memory” in the past. Human memory is partial, contingent, malleable, contextual, erasable, fragile. It is prone to embellishment and error. It is designed to filter. It is designed to forget. But there are people who want to put a lot of stock in offloading memory to machines, who may have better recall than my gray matter, but even with so called AI they suck at inference and context. But it's not a contest, John Henry. I do rely much on digital memory to connect, jog my human memory. This blog is an extensive record of ideas, activities I can use to mostly find out what I was working on or thinking about or ranting about going back to 2003. I rely more often on my flickr photos to tie in where I was before, or people I was with, as I can often search and find out say where I was on this day in 2010 (returning from a trip to Houston). But I often not only use the search, when I get to the photo, I am like doing the shelf browsing thing people did in libraries (in the old days). With a little trick, I can then move forward and backward in my image time line (you have to remove the stuff in the URL that comes from a search). Yet that is not my memory. It is pictures and often captions as pointers. It is not the territory. I also use my email history, Google Calendar, even my TripIt records to find where I was on certain days. Those are still not memories. They are more like meta-data to memories. Pointers. I think back to the web documentary (yikes, I am forgetting the name, but I will search later and find/link it) (Later- It was In Limbo) featuring a conversation with one of these guys who wears a camera all the time, life logging in photos. To me it was sad when he said rather pointedly that he values capturing all of this data, that... he never looks at the photos. What is the point? If you can capture all photos, you do have this extensive digital record. But to him, none of hos photos had value. There were more like some stop animation video of his daily doings. I cannot fault his method, it obviously means something to him. But that's not my practice. I also take photos every day, something I have done since 2008. But I do not photograph everything, I make choices as to what I can see as interesting, or possibly interesting during the day. Every night since 2008, I cull them, tossing away 2/3 of them, add captions, titles, tags, and upload to flickr. Are mine more valuable than his? Yes, to me. To me the process of choosing images reinforces the memory process, as does the writing of titles and captions, sometimes even short essays, stories. But even then, the memory is not in the photos or flickr. It's in me. They provide the stimulus to reconnect, to remember. Many people fly through life and never marvel at what's out the window. They seek sleep or silly movies or games. That's fine. But miss the experience of perspective of unnatural height, view, seeing a scale of their life that is just out there for the looking. But me? Face pressed to my life window, looking at where I have been, where I may want to go-- going back and forth in time and space-- and just in awe of it all. [caption width="640" align="aligncenter"]flickr photo shared by cogdogblog under a Creative Commons ( BY ) license[/caption] Top / Featured Image: Another trip flying into / out of Phoenix, me looking at the places I have been in the Superstition Wilderness area east of Phoenix my photo https://flickr.com/photos/cogdog/13504895753 shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license You love beer? Not the factory produced swill that gets manufactured in mass quantities, but the small runs by craft breweries? I have an opportunity for you! Four of THAT flickr photo by cogdogblog shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license I am offering for sale a 1.5% share of ownership of THAT Brewery located in Pine Arizona (and a second production facility in Cottonwood, Arizona. Check them out on the web. Nice web site, eh for THAT Brewery (I built it) I became an investor in 2011, using some of the proceeds from the sale of my Mom's house after she passed away. Local friends in the area told me how the owners of what was a small restaurant in Pine were converting it to a craft brewery and were looking for investors. Tamara and Steve had a solid plan for both the business (with numbers about the growth of craft beer in the state) and also how it would give back to the small community there. It was strategically located adjacent to the Arizona Trail, the 800 mile trek that runs south to north across Arizona (sales of THAT Arizona Trail Ale are donated to the trail organization). THAT Beer in a Can With a Map flickr photo by cogdogblog shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license I was just going to put the fund into the bank, and it seemed better to put it to work for a small local business. They've worked hard to get the beer into stores, restaurants, and bars across the state and winning many awards. They are major sponsors of local events, like the Fire on the Rim Mountain Bike Race. And I have greatly enjoyed the friendships and connections made through the people there. I've gotten to hang out and help (actually mostly just taking photos) when Steve was brewing, took part in the help of the move in to the Cottonwood facility, and mostly gotten to see up close how a small business can be much more for a community than just a business. And just for a small bit of fun, today I was scanning tweets, and one from boingboing caught my eye. The photo looked familiar... https://twitter.com/BoingBoing/status/1177229443473006593 That's my photo of a beer at THAT Brewery in Pine sitting right there in the boingboing post! See, this place has appeal. So I have no problem against holding on to my share. But... now I am living in Canada, and do not get to spend much time at the brewery. Plus my wife and I have a very strong desire to purchase a camper; selling the brewery investment can make that happen for us. So if you, or someone you know, wants a piece of a fine craft brewery, let me know. What could be finer that investing in beer? Get a piece of THAT now! Contact me through any channel, and I can tell you more. Featured Image: Bokeh Over Beer flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) cc licensed flickr photo shared by x-ray delta one This image is not exactly relevant, but was so bizarre I could not resist- who would not want a "Dual Head-mounted listening Device"? It looks like the perfect audio set up to enjoy radio ds106. I've been spending a chunk of time combing through the projects people did for the Web 2.0 Storytelling assignment 3 of ds106. Like I wrote before, this is really a bag of gold for me, as I am sifting for examples to add to the 50+ Ways site. I know for many people, likely the UMW students, the whole blogging may be a new experience. What is really great is I have not seen any two blogs that have the same template, and as we go, they are even getting more individualized with plugins, widgets, etc. Not meant as criticisms, having combed through about 30 or 40 today, a few gentle suggestions from someone who's been pounding the blog keys a while (and still learning how to do it better): Personalize that "About" page. If your about page still reads "This is an example of a WordPress page, you could edit this to put information about yourself or your site so readers know where you are..." you give your readers nothing to know about you. You need not labor over it, but it is your calling card. When I go to a blog, I want to know something about the writer. You dont have to give a biography, and honestly, it could be a place to be super creative. This is your digital locker, so hang some stickers and photos of Donny Osmond (no don't do that) (showing my age). Declare your name somehow. Ok, you may want to be coy or obtuse, that's okay. The default name assigned yo your posts are your wordpress username, and if it reads "d7ywtey" well, it makes it hard for me to give credit when I write about or link to your blog. You can change the way your name appears in your profile setting, or you could put a text widget on your sidebar, and do a mini "Hello, You can call me CogDog". You can even connect the previous point by doing a one line intro on the sidebar and then link to the about page (more...) Give Some Context, Please! I looked at a lot of entries where people embedded their stories-- but that was the whole post! As a reader, I want to know more about your story. What is the premise? How did you create it? What is the story behind the story? It is the liner notes, the DVD extras I crave. Take some time to describe more about the piece. Find a Voice. Writing more helps you better frame the narration, the story of your own site. You could be third person academic. You could lower case persona goofy. You could be insanely sarcastic or Steve Wright cryptic. Develop a style to your writing, your media in as much as you have your own personality. Give media Credit If you use media from other sources, be very exact- provide a link to the YouTube clip or the song URL- not just the site you got it from. And of course, I know you are all using contetn that is licensed under Creative Commons or other open licenses, right? Anyone? Bonus Jim Groom Tip Use paragraphs (that is a joke). Like photography, blogging is something you just get better at by doing, doing, and redoing. Given a draft of a post is withering/dying where I fail to conjure something meaningful about the Two Letter Acronym That Rhymes With Hey Bye, I'm reaching back to the old stuff that still matters, the magic of what I call unexpected web serendipity that spring from something we shared, did, uttered in an internet place. A Short-ish Version I'm feeling my tendency to write a long flowing story before even getting to the point. So here longer than a TLDR is my human written short-ish summary. In 2009 I went to my first Open Education Conference and presented-- as my take on the broad aspect of openness as way of being-- Amazing Stories of Openness (the link will reveal the premise and the original 34 stories). Now 14 years later, I am returning to the 2023 Open Education Conference with the same shtick, curious again if others experience what I still do to this day. Or maybe what is different or the same about the simple human act of sharing in open spaces when it generates un-anticipated serendipity. The new site for collecting stories (cough a SPLOT) hopefully illustrates what these are (try a random spin?). See the 2023 version of the same idea as well as my hopefully emphatic call for contributions. Can I convince you to share- you can add directly to the collection via links to videos and audio (or uploaded), or just an image and a written story. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u-pkl3Ssfvo Extended Cut More than 14 years ago, I ventured to Vancouver to meet colleagues I had mostly known only online at the 2009 Open Education conference. My work at the time was marginally related to open education (more focus to just the benefits and joy of the open web). Then, somewhat like now, much of the conference topics where about the "things"- open resources, open courses (some with 4 letter acronyms), open licenses. I can't remember the lightbulb moment (Oh here is an earlier framing what I called Only On The Web stories), but given a long interest in web-based digital storytelling, for the OpenEd09 conference I put out a call in June 2009 for what I called "_______ Stories of Openness" (I am not supposed to fill in the blank with "Amazing" but will falter). This was generated frankly by many of my own experiences where I found my flickr photos or blog posts or even messages in the baby bird days of a site known now by the 24th letter of the English alphabet got used in places/ways I would never expect, and people let me know (I lump them here as a webserendipty tag). My big hope was a collection of stories, beyond my own, might act as an incentive for more people to put their creations, writings, ideas, media into the open internet. The first collection of 34 video stories is still there online at http://cogdogblog.com/stuff/opened09/ I had this slick presentation tool called CoolIris (dead) that made them all available in a dynamic, interactive wall of media. This may have been the most fun I have had in a presentation. The wall of stories was one I could go through sequentially or at free will. Me on stage at OpenEd2009, photo by D'Arcy Norman shared under a CC BY-NC license Most of the stories I collected by nagging friends, colleagues recording in video Skype calls, or while at conferences, pulling out a now crude Flip video recorder or even a pocket digital camera. Some came via a google form or as a reply to my first call video. Heck those first ones were published as flash video (later changed to mp4). Apparently from my post presentation post I stayed up later the night before remixing the comic book covers to represent the categories of stories. What I had sought to do was build up that 2009 optimistic Web 2.0 era joy of what might be possible (not really forecasting what the present, then future, came to be): It seemed as well when I talked to the people who contributed this stories that it does not take much of a response (a comment, and email) to generate the feedback loop. We all crave connection and attention and approval, and filling the world with more of the above towards others cannot but help. It’s my hope that these stories just inspire a sense of, “I want to be part of this” or “that’s pretty easy” or whatever it is that makes people realize what I have known for long- when you share your stuff in the open, good things come back in return. That is not the reason to be sharing, but it is an outcome. https://cogdogblog.com/2009/08/whats-truly-amazing/ A key ingredient of the amazing factor is the not expecting it to happen. In re-reading my own human generated text I note the observation of Clay Burrell (who is in the original series), "If you don’t share... then you won’t get any unexpected surprises." I later framed this as my own message that I could not guarantee that sharing openly would yield a story worthy act/experience, but if you never shared, I could guarantee you'd never have one. I remixed (aka just recycled) this in several conference presentations, so I have milked it (too?) many times. And here I am back in 2023 with the same gimmick. The thing is, I keep having these unexpected acts happen that keeps on the magic of the web lamp, be it my graphic being spotted by a colleague in New Zealand as the backdrop to the Buggles concert or Felix's photo used for a Belgian insect based dog treat (you can't ChatGPT this stuff up) or how a blog post about numbers stamped on the bottom of a chair turned my blog into some kind of web meeting spot for people interested in Temple-Stuart furniture. It can't just be me that these weird coincidences happen to, even on the 2023 version of the world wide web. But maybe even right now as we are being flooded with machine generated artificial no-intelligent slime, what a better time to do what a machine cannot do, retell a human to human story that made your heart quicken and say, "Woah". So I am again asking/begging people to share a story on the SPLOT powered True Stories of Openness site. Videos are great (we take YouTube, Vimeo, even Tok-Tok links), but you can also contribute audio via Sonic Boombox, Vocaroo, Soundcloud (or uploaded audio). Or just plain writing along with some kind of image/photo. Again, see the splash/call/desperate plea for the 2023 Open Education Conference as well as other places out there I will be asking. I am also keen to see if I can solicit any 2023 reflections from the people who shared the original Amazing Stories so y'all can expect a message from me soon. Got a story? I am all ears here. Featured Image: Combination of images by me using Start the Show by D'Arcy Norman (CC BY-NC), screenshot of True Stories of Openness web site built by me (CC BY), logo from the 2009 OpenEd Conference (license ?? hopefully CC BY), and logo from the 2023 Open Education Conference (CC BY). flickr foto Pass the Suflur, Pleaseavailable on my flickr Most folks who have been to the Vancouver waterfront have likely marveled at this yellow mound- a ferry ride, a lot of pixels, and some cropping got me a nice closeup. I have dinkered away a bit more time than I would have preferred to set up this "blog from flickr to MT", but that is what happens why you start pawing around with new toys. It is a matter of clicking the "Blog This" icon from flickr: Anyhow, I had to do a bit of munging to the style flickr uses to create a post, and especially take out the CSS it inserts into the entry (instead putting it in my style sheet), modifying the styles to my liking. That gets really messy when you have MT's default to convert everything to HTML! Then I had to do some subsituting in the template on the flickr site, using their own template tags to insert my flickr-composed caption on the right of this image, and then put this text (which I am writing on the flickr site- screen shot pleeeze!). full size Composing an MT entry within flickr! The only thing I cannot seem to do is to assign MT categories or keywords (the latter I use to generate the full entry URL). Oh well, there is post-production in lots of things. I have the ds106 fever- I could not resist Jim Groom's new Spubble assignment (still looking for the tags in the ds106 assignment mix see http://ds106.us/2011/10/16/your-very-own-spubble/): Learn to love yourself, grab a picture of yourself in which your body language, actions, gestures, etc. suggest one thing and then play off that using a speech bubble. Ideally the result would make people laugh"”but I must acknowledge there are other possible emotional responses that may be just as acceptable. Think of it as lolcat, save it's a human (namely you) and there is nothing compelling anyone to abuse the letter z in the speech bubble text. Picnik.com or Aviary.com would make this assignment dead simple. Heck, I did 2 in about 10 minutes using Picnik right in flickr: cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog UPDATE APR 18, 2013: The archive lives! Watch the insanity! A bit of shtick I used in today's TCC World Online Conference keynote was an idea that settled in my noggin and would not shake loose. (more…) cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog Jumping into the ds106 audio, assignments, I wanted to take on ones that had few takers so far- and I remain stumped why Suess It was not given some ds106 attention: Take a Dr. Suess book, or perhaps the Berenstain Bears, or one of your own favorites, and read it to us. Give me your best Yertle the Turtle, or Lorax, or Mama Bear and have fun! Now just reading a book to me is not really doing ds106 in the "bring us your A Game" style- that would be just following the task literally. I think it should be done in an over the top (or under the bottom fashion). The choice of a book for me was easy, not juts because of my regular inclination to do something dog related, but because truly, Go Do Go was my all time favorite Seuss book as a kid. My copy was covered in crayon sketches (the clean one above was given to me as an adult, and I have kept the crayons away). I do not have my copy with me, so I read as much from the book as Amazon had on their peek inside. So here is my wobbly imitation of Tom Waits reading this book The background music is from the internet archive- a live recording of Hillbilly Jazz in Nashville (1975). This was recorded directly into Audacity, with the music imported. I like using the envelope tool to vary the levels of music to have it fade in and out, and drop under the spoken voice. [caption id="attachment_9039" align="aligncenter" width="500"] (click for full size)[/caption] Go Tom Go! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BcMIulAP0a8 cc licensed flickr photo shared by ~Aphrodite After all these years (this march will be the 7th) I still love flickr most of all what has become Web 2.0 - the Vancouver crew that fortunately failed on Game Never Ending (that explains the .gne extensions on some of the flickr URLs) for it right on social media, long before we had a name for it. And for me, it was the social tagging that lit a fire that continues to flame. I'm not going to wax on about all the ways tagging enables ways to share, find, connect, externally republish photos (oops, that's a little wax), but there has been something I've noticed yet forgotten about. I tag my own photos, well some.many of us do. We know where it was taken, we have some internal scheme for organizing (photos from a conference with s shared tag, photos to be pushed to a web site, photos form your daily photo project). But if I find one of your photos, and want to use tags to pool or group it with the same tag I am using-- for the most part, I cannot add tags to your photos. Well, I could, if you had modified your permissions from the default, as mine are: I typically notice this in the Spring, when I prepare our social media aspects for the NMC Summer conference. Typically, there are no tagged photos, so I like to start with ones from the city the conference is held in. But How can I get tagged photos for a city I've not been to? What I try is to ask our conference hosts tot do some for me. But if I search in flickr, most of the creative commons photos I find, which are set to be openly used through the license, most are not open for me to add, say an nmc2011 tag Because its not the default, and people mostly are not aware if it. But if you live in ir have photos of Madison, Wisconsin, please tag tag tag some local photos nmc2011). If you believe in openness and sharing, and you participate in flickr, shouldn't you open your photos to be tggged by others? If you tag why not let yourself be tagged? I find it interesting to see what others tag my photos (I see notice of this in the RSS feed for my flickr activity). Wouldn't it be illustrative to see what descriptive words other people see in your photos, perhaps themes, metaphors you do not see yourself? Wouldn't it expand the findability of images via tags if others could do the work for you? Sure, I guess someone would look at my photo of myself and tag it "dorkbutt" or "loser" but you can remove those. That, to me, is an edge case. Well, maybe it is a pretty regular tag applied by others to my photos. And until most of the flickr userbase follows my wishes (dreaming), wouldn't it be useful if flickr allowed an advance search for photos that are open to be tagged? I can think of all kinds of interesting activities and apps that could work off of that. Let yourself be tagged, just modify your account settings. Open up your photos to community tagging... The web elves have been doing some refining of our Maricopa Learning eXchange "packing slips"- mainly in the lower portions. For reference as we blog, see the MLX slip for the Correlation Meter. We wanted to make the commenting function for apparent by embedding the comment form directly in the packing slip, and using what should be familiar as the kind of form one finds on weblogs where name and em-mail can be cookie saved. We also extract the most recent comment in display form on the slip, with a link to see the rest, In parallel, you will find a revamp presentation (and under the hood implementation) or Trackback (described more than a year ago). Thanks also to Derek at Auricle for generating some ideas on Trackback. Given that the word "TrackBack" does not really describe the effect, we took liberty to call it "Shareback" meaning if you use, re-use, describe, mentione, blog one of our packages on some other web site, we have the tools to easily "shareback" that information with the MLX package. Like our comments, the Shareback area of the MLX packing slip now will display the most recent shareback, and link to more (if there is more than one). The Shareback display includes all pings registered, as well as more of an explanation of what we mean by shareback, and a web form where you can register the information if you lack the tools to do it for you. (more…) cc licensed ( BY NC SD ) flickr photo shared by Thruhike98 Back in 2007, I had this insane cross country tour of Australia- a fantastic invitation, opportunity, and no second guessing it for a minute.. but it was done as a visit to every capital city in a 2 week time span. I was working mad hours right up until I left, and it was my first weekend here, my first presentation stop in Hobart, Tasmania-- when I came down with a cold. The show had to go on, so I presented, socialized, coughed my way around the country. i got a doctor's housecall in Adelaide, and some scrips, and every possible suggestion for a cure, but the CogDogWog was strong: cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog So on this current trip, it was my choice to return to Tasmania since I hardly saw it. And damnit, wouldn't you know it, last night I felt that deadly sore throat and cough come on, and I am full in the Wog. Again. And again it won't keep me down... too long. At least on this trip, my 2 weeks here are purely my time, no obligations except the ones I create. I snoozed most of the drive back along the Great Ocean Road today--no, I am not driving, I might need a lot of assistance to do that: cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog And in the I Cannot Believe What Americans Suffer for Quote unquote Health Care department.... my friend Jan took me to a local strip mall. I walked in, without insurance coverage, without an appointment, and was sitting in a doctor's office within 5 minutes. He prescribed me an antibiotic (the visit cost me a whopping AU$35), I walked next door to a pharmacy, and within another 5 minutes had some antibiotics (it set me back US$17). At home, where I pay a lot more for insurance, under the same situation, I might have to wait to see a doctor, I would have paid a $50 co-pay, I would have driven to a pharmacy, and paid another $35-$50 co-pay for the scrips. If I were not feeling so crappy, I might try to find dome meaning in this. Anyhow, its rest for 2 days, and hopefully soon get this freakin' lampshade off my head and back to the real stuff. cc licensed ( BY NC ) flickr photo shared by sciondriver Do the same aesthetics that apply to traditional motion media (fil, tv) apply to web video? Video for New Media: Developing the Aesthetic and Managing the Workflow Pacific Ballroom, Salon G Tools & Techniques Intermediate Video production for the multi-media project is the art of adapting the decades old technology and aesthetic of television to the needs and sensibility of new media. This adaptation involves, among other things, the reassessment of issues of dimensionality, continuity, spatial logic and workflow. Attendees to this session will learn strategies of video production and post-production for the new media environment, including methods for subverting the established limitations of traditional motion media. Issues and solutions of postproduction workflow for multiple, simultaneous editors will be particularly stressed. Derek W. Toten, Tulane University The Continuity System creates narrative continuity relies on editing and mise-en-scene anyone working in narrative filmmaking is expexted to be familiar with Example http://www.405themovie.com/ Obvious elements of continuity... narrative chain of cause effect adherence to 180 degree line (axis of action) consistency of screen direction 30 degree rule use of establishing shots eyeline matches Shot reverse shot patterns match on action cutting rhythm dependent on camera distance of the shot (wide shots held longer then close-ups) "tried and true methods" sometimes violated but held overall. Less evident details of continuity graphic qualities roughly continuous from shot to shot figures are balanced and symmetrically deployed within a frame lighting consistent space of the scene clearly unfolds and does not jar or disorient Video example of montage of students talking about suggestions for packing for international travel (designed for peers speaking to peers) more less evident details of continuity motion flows from central theme nothing distracts from the center of attention Comparison of video clips on their own versus within the context of content in a web site or DVD. Examples aim to avoid having video in its own separate box. Spatial Logic Everything about continuity establishes 3D space within the 2d space of a screen. But spatial logic on the web is not as constrained Dimensionality Until recently all screens, all videos were 4:3 aspect ratio. Even HDTV is fixed (16:9). Film has established sizes as well. Web video is not constrained, can work against it. DVD video examples have video on right side of screen, taller than wide. Workflow For Multiple Editors Using Vegas Video for production. For multiple editors considered using Fiber Channel (server based, expensive...). Next, tried local Gigabit network within a LAN for sharing files (one audience member has a lab with 11 stations linked). Other approach is check in check out of portable hard drives. Requires more coordination but practical. Vegas cannot have multiple timelines drawing from the same media pool. I cannot seem to locate the tweet (the concept that Twitter search really searches everything is shattered every time I try), but a month or two back, @DrGarcia lamented a wee bit some sadness of not receiving letters in the mail. She's overly generous in the letter writing department. The practice of handwriting letters or postcards is not quite retro enough yet to be hip, but no inbox ding can match the warm feeling of finding a letter from a friend in your real mailbox. I came up with an idea to do a serialized chain of postcards, borrowing from the old idea of Burma Shave road sign poetry. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RgOee745Ri4 I started by just trying to write out what might work as a 4 or 6 card series, thinking first of many of GNA's tweets about dealing with the winter Chicago weather and the busses that do not show up. Writing hurt my hand! I hardly write. And I tried to be consistent with some block lettering, screwing up the S most of the time. On the address part, I tried to use a different "font" style, call cap, lower case, and the most forgotten form, cursive. This was fun to do. I went to the mailbox 6 days in a row-- sort of I forgot one or two days -- , I am hoping the cards arrived not quite knowing how long the trip from Kamloops, BC would take. All the card fronts (not shown) are from the Thompson River University campus. [caption id="attachment_40380" align="aligncenter" width="640"] public domain photo by Ken Koehler[/caption] This Wikimedia Commons image is more than an appropriate example since it is from my home state of Arizona, along the part of Route 66 west of Kingman, a place called Hackberry (very near a spot on the map called "Valentine"). This is a great part of the classic road since its not just the forgotten strip next to I-40, but its own scenic route to the town of Oatman. Talk about old school advertising (this from Wikipedia): Burma-Shave sign series first appeared in Minneapolis, Minnesota in 1925, and remained a major advertising component until 1963 in most of the contiguous United States. The exceptions were New Mexico, Arizona, and Nevada (deemed to have insufficient road traffic), and Massachusetts (eliminated due to that state's high land rentals and roadside foliage). Typically, six consecutive small signs would be posted along the edge of highways, spaced for sequential reading by passing motorists. The last sign was almost always the name of the product. The signs were originally produced in two color combinations: red-and-white and orange-and-black, though the latter was eliminated after a few years. A special white-on-blue set of signs was developed for South Dakota, which restricted the color red on roadside signs to official warning notices. This use of a series of small signs, each of which bore part of a commercial message, was a successful approach to highway advertising during the early years of highway travel, drawing the attention of passing motorists who were curious to learn the punchline. As the Interstate system expanded in the late 1950s and vehicle speeds increased, it became more difficult to attract motorists' attention with small signs. When the company was acquired by Phillip Morris, the signs were discontinued on advice of counsel. Not surprisingly, twitter is the perfect vehicle for Burma Shave messages. @Burmashave runs 'em "we offer for / your starving brains / the news summed up / in trite quatrains (25x daily)" Or semi frequent messages from @burmashave_sign. Or @Burmashave_ which seems to a musician that has nothing to do with old signs or rhymes. Not surprisingly the idea has been xkcd-ed And the requisite "This would make a great DS106 Daily Create" Rhyme on, this was more fun with a pen than I have done in a while. ds106 is ramping up, and Michael Branson Smith is going deeper in thought with the idea of the animated GIF: I'm a big lover of the animated GIF having created dozens as bits of reflection on cinematic moments, film posters and comic book covers. These animations are all fabulous homages to stories I love. But I've also really enjoyed discovering how the animated GIF became an extension of traditional photography using subtle bits of animation. They're perfect loops of moments in time, animated still lives. Amazing"¦ Watch her hair and dress flow endlessly, while her eyes hold a perfect stare. Don't blink. Yes it's an amazing piece of craftsmanship, definitely a smooth Photoshopper behind this animated loop. I credit their ability, but it doesn't inspire me. This is what I believe the cinem(gram)graph needs to celebrate "“ this impishness, raucousness. I love the impossible people are discovering in this medium. So never mind the endless perfect moment, loop a portal into the impossible. He's right on- I was looking at the gallery of some of the premiere people who have raised the craft to a new level .. and while gorgeous and perfect... they feel cold. Lifeless. Stepford-ish. Waifs with wispy hair and sleeves fluttering. I'm giving Michael's ideas dome more though into how to go about this. I still enjoy the approach of making a GIF from a series of photos (most of the so called tutorials suggest doing it from video, but that is too easy IMHO, almost as cheap as using some app). The real craft of GIFfing to me is making it minimal- minimal number of frames, minimal color palettes, making them small1. On yesterday's visit to the Virginia Natural Bridge, everyone there as trying to get the whole natural thing to fill their camera, or those poses of "look at me and Aunt Belinda in front of George Washington's initials". I was looking at the watercolor-like reflections of the arch in the water, and it told me of motion: This was done in the way IO have done photo gifs before; I had 4 photos, but in looping, it looked stuttery at the repeat point. So in the photoshop animation frame I copied frame 3 (use the menu on the top tight corner), clicked on the last frame, and clicked paste- this gave me the option to paste it after the last frame. I then copies frame 2 and did the same. So now I had this series: 1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - 3 - 2 which would be a full reversal in animated form. It's kind of pretty, but not really far into the impossible. But its only 257kb (dropping the colors form 128 to 32 chopped it down from 500+k) For my next trick, I decided to see what I could animate from this single photo, a sad clown from the last putt of an abandoned miniature golf course: cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog Now one thing I could have played with might be a ghostly ball rolling up the rame and into the magic hole - I just thought of that, maybe I will do it. But I then thought of animating just the eye- so I lasso-ed a selection pasted into a new frame, and used the Puppet Transform tool (never used before) to squeeze the eye down. That was okay, the eye sort of blinked, but so what? What would make it work as the tear- I did not even see it until I zoomed in, so I made two more copies and moved it down the cheek. This one is only 127kb since the 2 layers of movement are just small bits, not full frames. GIFs compress well when there is not a lot of small pixel to pixel changes. [caption id="attachment_9473" align="alignnone" width="500"] (click for full size)[/caption] This was really just an experiment, but now I am revved to think about how I can generate animation from single frames or photos. Copying bits of layers, using the magic brush and this Puppet Transform tool has me inspired. More impossible2, bring it on. 1 I've had Steve Martin on my mind since Gardner Campbell and I snorted the whole drive in to Virginia Tech while listening to his classic old stuff. I saw him in like 1979 at Merriwether Post Pavilion 2 "to shove a Cadillac up your nose" ibid 3 I am totally ripping off Tom Woodward on the use of snarky footnotes. I bet you don't ever look to see what's on the bottom side of your furniture. I didn't. Not till today. The featured photo on this post is the bottom side of a most special piece of furniture, the rocking chair that belonged to my deceased brother. It has its own story (read only if you want tears). David's Chair flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) David's chair is maybe one of the most important memory item in my house. Why did I decide to look underneath? I didn't. On Saturday I moved all my living room furniture off the dirty carpet, so I can get it steam cleaned this week. All that furniture is piled in the adjacent tiled space. I lifted David's chair and sat it on the couch, and it's almost in my face from where I sit at my adjacent table I work from. While eating breakfast today I noticed first the stencil text that looks like 943 R Duxbury "Interesting" I thought, might that be the name of the craftsman who made it? Below is a faded seal with what looks like a manufacturer's name, with about a third of the letters faded. The top word which shows just "TEMP__" is most surely "TEMPLE" but below-- is it "SHARP"? Finally I made it out to be "STUART" as a guess. A pretty good one. Most of the results I find are sale pages for Temple Stuart chairs, tables, and hutches, or antique sites where people send info in hopes of finding they have a rare piece of furniture. Sadly this kind of stuff referred to as "American Brown Furniture" and is not very valuable. That's not my interest, David's chair is quite banged up. I think one of my dogs gnawed on the arm rests. I found the 2010 obituary for Donald Stuart who had been President of the Temple Stuart Furniture company; it's not clear here if he was the founder or if it was a family business. He lived in Baldwinville, MA. There is a timely image of a 1967 ad looks like it is is in the height of American Brown Furniture era: From Furniture World Magazine As a sideline, Stuart's bio in Furniture world leads me to the Bernice Bienenstock Furniture Library on Highpoint North Carolina: With more than 5,000 furniture and design specific volumes, The Bernice Bienenstock Furniture Library is the largest furniture specialty library in the world. The rare book collection contains volumes published since 1640 and includes a collection of the original works of 18th century furniture masters Chippendale, Sheraton and Hepplewhite, as well as a complete 26 volume set of Diderot’s Encyclopedia published in 1776. This is one of the few, if not the only place in the world where design professionals, scholars, students, and the public can don a pair of white gloves and examine the original works of the pioneer designers in our industry. The library also contains rare drawings and furniture details. It is a treasure trove of inspiration, information and illustration for anyone interested in design. Maybe the most curious link came to an EPA site report on the Temple-Stuart site on Baldwinville MA (dead link report now available at https://response.epa.gov/TempleStuart), this is most definitely the location of the Temple-Stuart furniture makers, it's where my brother's chair came from! The Temple-Stuart site is a 23-acre property with five adjoining buildings and a garage located in a largely residential area at 4 Holman Street, Baldwinville, Massachusetts. Baldwinville is one of four villages which comprise the Town of Templeton, whose population is 7000. The Temple-Stuart facility is approximately three eighths of a mile from the center of Baldwinville. :: Building A (the “Mill/Assembly Building”) is a two-story, 12,500 square foot (ft2), concrete brick building located on the southeastern portion of the property, which reportedly contained a tool shop, dryer rooms, and a boiler room. Transformers were formerly located on the lower floor of the southwestern portion of the building. Building B (“the Frame Stain Shop”) is a 7,500 ft2 two-story concrete brick and wood building adjoining the western side of Building A. Most of its windows are broken, and much of the roof and roof vents have begun to collapse. Building B reportedly also contained a storage room and boiler room. : : The site was first occupied in 1884 by Holman and Harris (H&H), a manufacturer of wooden containers, including pails, tubs, and buckets. In 1909, H&H ceased operations and vacated the site. In 1910, the Temple-Stuart Company began manufacturing wooden furniture at the site. Temple-Stuart constructed various buildings and additions to existing structures. The company is thus named for the Stuart Family and its location is near Templeton, MA. The company was started in 1910. Since Donald Stuart's obituary stated he was born in 1925, then I guess his father started the furniture company which built David's rocking chair. The reason the Temple-Stuart facility is on the EPA site is because in the 1990s they found underground storage tanks with fuel and benzene in them, and thus it was designated an environmental remediation site. That's about the end of my investigation. I have no idea what "943 R Duxbury" is -- I imagined it was the name of a person who made it? Just an inventory code? The old version of a QR-code? There is a Duxbury in Massachusetts but it is 100 miles from Baldwinville. I asked my sisters if they knew much about the chair. The color was similar to the maple bedroom set I had as a kid- two dressers, a bed frame/headboard, and I think a clothes tree. I do remember that it was the furniture my dad had as a kid. I thought maybe the chair was part of the set, but my older sister (whose adult son still uses the old dresser) said no, that the chair was a gift for my Mom when David was born. So after getting curious about the information on the bottom of an old chair, I have no further insight into the family store, but do have a few tangents of arcane information about a family furniture company from Massachusetts, whose legacy is left now as a hazardous waste site. One never knows where curiosity paths will lead you, and sometimes, it's just the time spent searching that matters more than what you find. Update Sep 14, 2025 Eight years later this post continues to get comments, just today from Darleen who mentions owning the same rocking chair. Also in the mix is comment from Sam, a grandson of the Stuart who started the company, plus one from Liana who lives in the old Stuart family home. This, for folks who want to cry about the internet being so awful and a dead wasteland of corporate garbage, is the counterpart. https://cogdogblog.com/2020/10/furniture-flea-market/ Just because my curiosity keeps going, and for any Temple-Stuart fans who find this post, I will add that I did find a link to a Facebook group for Temple-Stuart Furniture Memories and Experiences - I can't say much more since that is not a web site that I use, but others might. And perhaps the greatest find, is this video by J-MASS of a real tour of the abandoned Temple-Stuart site in Baldwinwille, MA where the caption alone is very informative, especially with a better link for the one I had from the EPA report on the site. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aVCy7vjJtIM Keep those links and comments coming, you fans of Brown American furniture! Featured image: https://flickr.com/photos/cogdog/33124000242 Secret Messages Underneath a Chair flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) Our Open Education 2015 presentation yesterday on the UDG Agora project was scheduled in the big vast main ballroom. The big house. Along with Tannis Morgan, Brian Lamb, and Terri Bateman, we tried to cram a lot of stuff into a 30 minute box. My "weird idea that my colleagues should laugh it off dismissively" was to do it as listicle. Hence before working on my portions of the content, I was playing with Webmaker X-Ray Googles: Our plan was to present each 2 "things" as topics we could present, first brainstormed in a google doc. For the presentation itself we used a setup I had done last year as part of my TRU Fellowship-- the "slides" are actually in a Wordpress site, using a theme that puts images up large, and then allowing the body of the "post" to be more or extra material. Well, rather than over explaining, here is our presentation/site: [caption id="attachment_50344" align="aligncenter" width="630"] Open Ed 2015 UDG Agora presentation[/caption] Audio recording of presentation (15.4 MB mp3) [audio mp3="http://udg.theagoraonline.net/opened15/files/2015/03/opened-2015-udg-agora.mp3"][/audio] The Eight Topics: 1. Collaborate Across Space, Time, and Culture 2. Do Stuff! Design a Studio and Challenge Based Approach 3. Open More Than Materials– as in Open Pedagogy 4. Build a Space with Open, Customizable Technologies (duct tape & wires) 5. She said this One Weird Word. Everyone was Blown Away 6. Create a Layered Structure of Participation with Optional Pathways 7. This Group Went to Guadalajara; What Happened Next was Amazing! 8. Unabashed Open Sharing is Not Only Possible and Infectious In the spirit of Not Starting With a List of Bullet List Outcomes, Tannis opened with an idea we had done previously for a presentation on this at the ETUG Fall Workshop; a series of True/False questions about the University of Guadalajara to highlight how little we likely know about this impressive system. The night before I left, I had an idea to change it up a little (personally, I loathe true and false quizzes) into a fill in the blank format. I had some idea that I could rig up something that could pop up or reveal the answers after clicking on a blank. As usually with Wordpress, the first cut at searching revealed a few possibilities, but most were about revealing blocks of text for those accordion toggles like reveals. With a few more plays of search terms, I landed on A Plugin That Saved Me From Coding It - the Peekaboo plugin in. When you land there it does display that notice that often sends people running: This plugin hasn’t been updated in over 2 years. It may no longer be maintained or supported and may have compatibility issues when used with more recent versions of WordPress. The key term is "may" - that does not rule out trying and it worked out well; with some shortcodes I had something where we could show/hide the answers (below as an animated GIF, but go try yourselves) [caption id="attachment_50347" align="aligncenter" width="600"] The quiz in action[/caption] Okay, that was a gimmick. I was thinking I had to blog again how this was made, but apparently I had done this a year ago (#whew) https://twitter.com/cogdog/status/667412471351676928 The ingredients again (beyond having in your kitchen a self-hosted baking dish of Wordpress). Each "slide" is a post. One Intergalactic Theme (free in Wordpress repository) One Post Types Reorder plugin (there is more goodness and an advanced version from NSP Code) - this lets you set an arbitrary order of the posts, rather than monkeying with the publish date (which does work if you do not want to deal with a plugin, or it would work on Wordpress.com).There is a bit of mind flipping, you actually do want to use this plugin to re-order your posts (simply by dragging and dropping via the Re-Order link under Posts in the Dashboard), but it must be in reverse order.This is because of the way the bottom navigation links work- the "next" button on the left is actually the "previous" post link. I am sure my explanation is causing more confusion, but you will see the issue the first time you try it-- if you put them in order from first to last, the "next" button will be the left arrow! A sprinkling of Custom CSS. On a multisite Wordpress (like ours) I always enable the Simple Custom CSS plugin that adds a a Custom CSS box to any theme (under Appearance in the Dashboard) since not all themes provide this. This does some trickery to hide content in the theme's footer, and reduce the navigation to have just giant arrows, rather than links with the post names: This is why knowing something about CSS (Custom Styling Spices) takes you a notch above the other cooks. Here is the CSS: /* Enter Your Custom CSS Here */ .site-description { font-size: 1.5em; font-weight: 900; color: rgb(165, 6, 18);} .entry-content {width:90%;} .post .entry-meta, .author-avatar, .author-bio, .entry-footer, footer#colophon {display:none;} span.meta-nav { color: #222; font-size: 500%;} .post-navigation .nav-previous a , .post-navigation .nav-next a {font-size: xx-small; color: #fff; width:120px; padding:0} img.size-big, .wp-caption.caption-big {margin-left: inherit;} Oh there is a bonus ingredient you can see in the screenshot above, the Creative Commons Configurator plugin, which adds a license to the bottom of all posts/slides. It was (I hope) an interesting presentation experience at Open Ed; well we had fun. It is still way way too much to try and fit into a presentation, but hopefully should do what these events should do. Rather than trying to communicate everything about a project, it's just a sampling, small bites, to get people intrigued to ask more. Heck we even had a UDG Agora Studio on this called Bocados Pequenos. Learn more about more Top Things About UDG Agora at http://udg.theagoraonline.net/ because eight was not nearly enough. Top / Featured Image Credits: Found unattributed on Max Woolf's blog, so I am compounding the problem. Oh well. I like the image, whomever made it/ owns it. This seems by my time to working on projects using web annotating. As noted early, we are planning more extensive use of hypothes.is in netnarr but the really Big Show is taking off this week, the project with Gardner Campbell on Annotating Doug Engelbart's Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework. Some of the background has already been laid bare (okay my new to blogging students, that is know as a link- it gives context without a need to explain in full depth). My piece of the pie has been building the web site and working with Gardner on the plan for the project. That's the set up of the meal, what happens hinges on folks sitting down at the table. The project web site-- more cool stuff below the fold! For this project's site I went with the free Fluida theme, same as I used for the Mural UDG project. It's not let me down, it has tons of flexibility for the front page. Like most sites, this one did not start with some detailed design scope, it's been more in the bread making style of kneading and shaping as we go. And damnit, there is flour all over the kitchen! More about the bolts and nuts below. The aim of the project is... well you can read it. And annotate it. The project is going to be a 3 week effort to coordinate as many people as we can to read Engelbart's 1962 paper with each other, and use Hypothes.is to annotate, augment, discuss and add meaning to three main sections identified by Gardner. That starts next week. This is what I coined Week[0] (hey like an array, we start counting at 0!) a week to ramp up interest, but also orient people to thinking about Engelbart and getting people up to speed with using Hypothes.is. I've not found that people have too many problems with it, but wanted to create a 3 part step in. It follows an approach I set up for our netnarr students. Rather than sending people off to Hypothes.is to create accounts and read their intro materials (which are quite good)-- it can all be done in action, and in place on our site. We enter people into Hypothes.is by having them visit our About page - by having the Hypothesis WordPress plugin enabled. This means the tool is automatically turned on, and just by having people click the tool in the top right to open it's "drawer", they can either login if they have an account, or create one right there. The idea here is to have them practice annotating and commenting on this page, using it as a place to do intros (we already have 15 responses to that request). The second step, Annotate Anywhere, has a dual purpose. One is to demonstrate how you can turn Hypothes.is on anywhere, by either using a browser tool (Chrome Extension or bookmarklet for Firefox, Safari) or by knowing how to make/use a via link, the URL method of turning Hypothes.is on any page. The other purpose is to lay out the larger focus of the project, so well written by Bret Victor's tribute. The easiest to Hypothesize yourself is using a "via link" https://via.hypothes.is/http://worrydream.com/Engelbart/ -- if you are a savvy reader of URLs I bet you can see how to use Hypothes.is anywhere. Got it? There's a strong message in Victor's post, I heard when I was looking for images to use in the post. I was really hoping to find an image of Engelbart writing, or reading, or sitting at a desk pondering. But nearly all the images are him with the Mouse, or doing The Demo, or at a device (well there are many images of him in a group of people). Just to go meta-weird-nostalgic, 10 years ago I was in world celebrating The Demo in The Second Life-- Mother of All Demos flickr photo by NMC Second Life shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license In Victor's closing paragraph, and asking about the world Engelbart hoped to create, we hope, is a place people get to in their annotation work. If you truly want to understand NLS, you have to forget today. Forget everything you think you know about computers. Forget that you think you know what a computer is. Go back to 1962. And then read his intent.The least important question you can ask about Engelbart is, "What did he build?" By asking that question, you put yourself in a position to admire him, to stand in awe of his achievements, to worship him as a hero. But worship isn't useful to anyone. Not you, not him.The most important question you can ask about Engelbart is, "What world was he trying to create?" By asking that question, you put yourself in a position to create that world yourself.Bret Victor's Tribute to Doing Engelbart our second annotation practice The last of the three intro pieces for Week[0] are published under "Roads of Annotations" -- our plea for "voracious" tagging as well as some suggestions to answer the question of "how do I annotate" (it is worth noting that my name is on the post since I set it up, but that section was written by my nugget seeking expert colleague). This is all the lead up for Weeks [1], [2], and [3] where we dive in deeply (we hope) to annotating the Main Event paper. Those weeks will be full on, as Gardner is lining up a star studded [yet to be announced] featured annotators. These are people who are invited to add some annotations to a specific part of the paper, and then guests on video interviews to talk about and looking being their approach annotating. And this is what makes annotating, a rather old process, new again-- we can be doing this thought thinking together, from different places and perspectives. There's much more in the mix. We're excited to be using the CROWDLAAERs tool https://crowdlaaers.org/ (thanks Remi and Francisco) to provide a visual way of seeing the overall annotation activity by date, tag, thread, and annotator. It's quite an impressive tool to be able to use, to give a real time way to see activity. We are pleased to be there as a listed project that provides access to the three target sources of annotation for this project. But anyone can easily create a CROWDLAAERS for any single source... and hey, it's easy if you are URL literate - here is the way to see the annotation activity for the Bret Victor post https://crowdlaaers.org/?url=http://worrydream.com/Engelbart/ And we have a bot! I had set up a version of Zach Whalen's Google Spreadsheet twitter bot, so @dengelbot regular tweets passages from the Augmenting Human Intellect paper, e.g. https://twitter.com/DEngelbot/status/1093438187840700417 I've also been dabbling with some duct tape to use the RSS feed of annotations on the paper be a source that our bot might tweet as well. That remains to be seen. And speaking of twitter, if you do issue some tweets, please use our #augmentintellect hashtag; we have a Twitter TAGs setup to archive tweets and, with it, to generate visualization of the conversations. All aside, we are hoping to pop the doors off the system with a large amount of annotation on the full paper starting next week. This is not a course, a mooc, a workshop, it's just a gathering to read, annotate, discuss... augment, together. What is it about a paper, a 150 page paper? What was his intent? It was what was in Doug Engelbart's thinking much earlier-- the ideas published in 1962 way before the Mouse and the Demo. Come annotate with us? Head over to https://framework.thoughtvectors.net/ Featured Image: Doug Engelbart image with message found on blogpost on a presentation. The image itself is credited to the Tribute to Doug site but it's one that came from the Doug Engelbart Institute. It's ironic (and goes back to the Bret Victor Tribute), that despite the words on this image, it always goes back to the tech Doug brought us: Doug Engelbart is known for something called the ‘mother of all demos’, and he also invented the mouse. They had a vision about what technology was all about. Is that really what it was about? It started as just some tweets, making fun of buzz words with Laura Gibbs and Bill Fitzgerald https://twitter.com/OnlineCrsLady/status/608315549207171075 https://twitter.com/funnymonkey/status/608316228520837122 This the day before I left for DML 2015, and an idea to do something at the conference- I put an idea in a doc and sent it to Laura... we added a few words. The idea was to have these lists of words on cards (or I put them in a spiral) and ask people at DML to say them as if it was the most exciting thing ever. Here are the words: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=40yIx1WLwwQ I ended up with 15 people, I could have done more, or edited more tightly, or... but this is enough. Right? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4LMxY4tKatA The music was ccmixter CC0 music by Forkboy-- "Dubstep Beat 150" ... and Molly Ransome put the killer attitude on the close. Tell me how many people you can recognize, and if they are giving it their all. Thanks for playing. On rummaging through some bookmarks, I saw a number of sites I could barely remember, and a number of them were ones I had created accounts. This is the beginning of social software amnesia. For some reason, I decided to go back to one, slidez, which is not all that unique, but certainly works elegantly to allow you to upload images, annotate with titles and captions, and generate slide shows that can be shared. Just tossed in some images from my folder of desktop photos to make a slidezshow. That full sized one is pretty, and here is the embedded version provided by cut and paste: Free stuff, content served from Amazon s3 (which is seemingly a base for a lot of 2.0ish content), not bad. And maybe slipping back to the amnesia zone. cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog This is Richard Dean, an affable and eager to share park guide I stumbled into in Arco, Idaho. I had just visited a rather interesting museum located on the property of the Idaho National Laboratory (INL)- the place where nuclear fission was used to runt he first breeder reactor (which means the process of fission of U-235 created as a by product, more material that could be used to generate with), the EBR-1. Nearby Arco, aka "Atomic City" was the first city to be powered by electricity from a nuclear generator, the EBR-1. The EBR-1 museum has much of the original (or replica) machinery form the 1950s in the building where it really happened, all kinds of fun things ripe for taking quirky photos (which I did). I really stopped in Arco to get gas and ice, and as I was driving out, I noticed at the same time I had not put a box down in the back of te truck that would obscure by view, and.. on the right, here in the middle of high desert terrain, was the top "sail" of a submarine, with a big old 666 on it cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog This could not be passed for some photos either, and as I was taking them, Richard walked up and started telling me about the town park I was in- it was in recognition of nuclear subs. What I did not know is that the nuclear propulsion reactors at INL were used to train close to 40,000 Navy personnel who went to work on nuclear subs. So if you are going to work on a nuclear sub, you will learn how to do it in southern Idaho. Back to Richard Dean. He served in the Coast Guard and retired to Arco, and just wanted to tell me all about the subs and nuclear stuff. I told him I was doing a documentary (stretch) of interesting places in the US, and asked if I could record him... I am not sure he fully grasped him, but I ended up with about 3 minutes of conversation and 14 minutes of a tour of the park's museum (inside a shipping container) -- all of which is now in my StoryBox. This means the only place you can hear Richard's voice is by meeting me somewhere on the road where the StoryBox is open, or wait until I attempt to weave it together at the end of the trip. I have a photo of him in there (a took a few, so one goes into flickr, one into the box). I had also gotten a nice conversation recorded with Ramone, the young man who was the guide at EBR-1. I'm finding this is maybe the easiest thing to get people to add something to the StoryBox (though my last blog post nicely triggered about 18 new items, thanks to everyone!). The current content counts for the StoryBox are: audio recordings: 15 documents: 4 drawings: 6 graphics: 3 music: 9 photos: 56 videos: 8 It's still early, but the part of seeing/hearing things out of context is making this interesting. And don;t just sit back, keep the stuff coming- and be anonymous in content and creative in file naming Upload as many things as you like to dropitto.me/cogdog -- use the password storybox. You can also email attachments to my dropbox via alan_x2ze (AT) sendtodropbox DOT com -- just send the file; I am not tracking the emails sent, so I won't know who it is from. And I am finding getting people to talk is pretty easy. And making that opening past "How are you doin'?" "not bad, you?" with people like Richard Dean is what is making this trip worth it. Bring on the crashing sounds of ACDC to be heard around the web... For Those About To Write HTML Tags (I Salute You)! Stand up and be countedFor what you are about to receiveWe are the web makersHTML gives you everything you needHail, hail to the basic tags'Cause the web has got the right of wayWe ain't no trenders, ain't no marktersWe're just writin' the web every dayFor those about to write HTML, we salute youFor those about to write HTML, we salute you Re-written ACDC Lyrics in the full turn it up to 11 spirit of parody https://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/acdc/forthoseabouttorockwesaluteyou.html It's all about an old t-shirt, one I found in the bottom/back of the drawer, and then posted on flickr. https://flickr.com/photos/cogdog/54523545261 2025/365/132 For Those About to Write Hypertext flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) A quick commenter, because comments are the magic glue, Grant said, "I’d love to see this shirt printed again." You have been heard. Lacking a blog post, I am relying solely on my internal memory, but I believe I had found through search and image of the HTML letter rendered in ACDC that I wanted to use in a presentation. But the source of the image was from a T-shirt sold at from an online shop form what was a design firm called The Unrefinery -- the site is gone, and the domain features something in Japanese that I cannot get Google to translate. As always, some scouring in the Internet Archive not only found the old Unrefinery Shop, but even the shirt, called HT*ML Rocks! -- "For those about to write semantic markup!" I really wanted to juse the image, but in lieu of a proper open license, I made up my own conditions- I decided if I bought the shirt, I could justify re-using the image (no that would not hold up in court, but no one came suing me). And thus it became a favorite shirt, though now extremely faded, torn, a tad... er.... small. The whole archeology of old t-shirts led to today's DS106 Daily Create I submitted (but used another old shirt) -- https://daily.ds106.us/tdc4884/ https://daily.ds106.us/tdc4884/ Maybe I left the HT*ML shirt for my response? So I thought, "Surely someone else is offering a shirt i this design (and stop calling my Shirley!)" I found one on Redbubble but I did not want the text below. There was another link for a design on Shirtboss that google indicated could generate the ACDC style with any text, but the link never opened. The heck with the web, I can make this design myself! I found the perfect ACDC style font (for free) called Squealer. And in opening up Photoshop, I found from sheer trying that option-8 on my Mac in this font, rendered the lightning bolt. Kaching! It took little effort to create a transparent PNG and upload it to my own shirt shop where it is now available for my billions of fans to order, as For Those About to Write Tags. Order your HT•ML AC/DC style shirt now! https://cogdog.threadless.com/designs/for-those-about-to-write-tags available in all colors as long as it's Back in Black (maybe a dark grey). And just to be clear, in line with my non-commercial approach https://cogdogblog.com/2024/12/open-for-business/ Any "profits" from Threadless are sent to charity. I'll be ordering my own shirt, and ni about 14 years it will be worn and torn enough to re do this blog post into another one. This is just a dirty deed done dirt free along the highway to web hell as it ain't no fund (waiting round to be a tech billionaire). HTML rocks. Again. Featured Image: My own creating of HTML rendered in AC/DC font style using the Squealor font. DO with it whatever you like! Got a nice email and link from the folks at Blog Harbor, a blog hosting service that offers a number of worthy add-ons for those who prefer not to tinker (and mess up) their own blog server. They have created a nicely formatted and structured guide to a hosted version of our RSS to JavaScript feed scripts. See Add RSS Headlines to Your Weblog. Hopefully that will be a good nudge for me to get my act together and clean up our demo site for the RSS to JS demo and script. It needs help, I know! It needs to be segmented into meaningful content sections, I know! It needs some basic documentation, I know! On a related front, some mis-placed comments in a recent post led to discovery of a small problem with some RSS feeds using the ' HTML entity in the RSS feed- it is a valid contsutrct in XML but not HTML, so sometimes you get a quote, sometimes code. I've tinkered with a small edit to take care of that situation, but need a wee bit more testing. Start this thing up! For the Reclaim Open Conference there is a bunch of Conflabulating going on. Someone one had to get the FeedWordPress thing going, might as well leave it tot he dog. It's been three or four forevers since I messed around with the FeedWordPress plugin but that old C Johnson magic might be working. We have three blogs pushing content there by tags and labels and carrier pigeon. My tag is #wildDS106 yours can be whatever the heck you like. If you want the DS106 Syndication bus to come around to your blog, let me know. The one thing that doe snot work, and was always a problem, is Featured images. Now not surprised, because tere is no RSS place for that, Featured Images are a WordPress construct (a nice one). In days of olde I was able to get it going with plugins that auto generated them from the first image in the post, but that does not seem to be working. Get on the bus! Featured Image: The #ds106 Bus flickr photo by cogdogblog shared under a Creative Commons (BY 2.0) license It has been a loooooong time since I looked at the Demotivational Posters from Despair, which I can remember from way back when the web was young and we spun HTML by hand. For a lover of sarcasm, this is one of the highest art forms, taking potshots at those motivational posters the PHBes put up in the office to "inpsire" your widget production. For some lost brain neuron snappage, I peeked back and plucked a few fun ones: Intimidation: No one can make you feel inferior without your consent, but you'd be a fool to withhold that from your superiors. Nothing like being the BIG dog! Curious Beggar by cogdogblog posted 17 Sep '08, 5.16pm MDT PST on flickr This little guy was curious about the gigapan I had set up to do this shot gigapan.org/viewGigapan.php?id=9189 I gestured to take a picture and he smiled, then he stuck his hand out for change. Now I was stuck, except the only thing in my wallet were 100 Yuan bills! I had to comply, so ran to a drink stand to buy some water to get him some change, He is kind of cute One of the more fascination aspects of being inn China has been watching people and their faces. Some of the faces are so somber, some so expressive. Without any understanding of the language, it's fun to try and guess their conversations, as you see people laughing, arguing, chatting, playing games... Today was another wandering day in the city, taking a cab down to the area close to the "Bund", the waterfront here with the views of the massive skyscrapers across the river, and area which, we were told was empty of anything until the mid 1990s. I was joined by Clarence Fiasher, Brian Crosby, and Julie Lindsay, who then went on her own mission to buy a saxophone... We walked down the heavy commercial (like new style) of East Nanjing Street, a pediestrian wide way of store after store of that weird mixed Western and Chinese commerce. It was another area full of people who want to be friends and sell you a Rolex (I am estimating there are 5 billion such watches in this country), bags, shoes, fake iPods, DVDs. Swatting them away ranges from annoying to sometimes fun. Their tactics are horrible but its also sad to see people having this as the best opportunity to make some money. I got a pretty good Gigapan of this scene of East Nanjing Street http://gigapan.org/viewGigapan.php?id=9161 One cheery guy in a tan shirt who wanted me to see his "store" I waved off by saying we were going to lunch and I'd see him later. What a surprise 2 hours later as he returned and he was there smiling, and got me in a bear bug greeting. We laughed when I said I did not need anything. Clarence and I did like another 90 minute wander up and down the side streets, where you are away from the shiny stuff, not haggled, happily ignored by people zooming around on their business, and the "Stores" are really almost stalls of amazing specialty from a hinge store to a caulk store to several wire stores, places selling fresh fish, pig parts, bowls of live snakes... In the evening we met up with Jeff Utecht and more of the conference gang, getting to meet in person finally David Warlick and David Jakes, and a fantastic chinese dinner followed by what I have heard is the legendary foot massage. This morning we are off to a local event, and EduBloggerCon Shanghai http://www.edubloggercon.com/Learning+2.008+Edubloggercon and the Learning 2.008 conference opens tonight where I and my colleagues are supposed to do a 10 minute "TED" style talk of something "inspirational" to teachers. It's been running as a free web service for over eight years, from my little humble PHP script hacking in 2003. Feed2JS (http://feed2js.org/) provides a tool where anyone can enter a URL for an RSS feed, choose some options, and generate a bit of cut and paste JavaScript code they can use in their own web sites. Once in place, this provides a widget that is updated automatically as the RSS feed it refers to changes. The idea owes its origin to the early work of Stephen Downes in RSS and the model of a ASP script I found created by David Carter-Todd (who I hope to find when I get to Blacksburg) In doing this, a lot of traffic is routed through the Feed2JS server. More than I may have even guessed. I developed this and ran it from 2003 to maybe 2005 on a server at the Maricopa Community Colleges, and then had been hosted for free at Modevia Web Services after a kind offer from Aaron Axelsen. I never even had to look at the web server for the last 6 years. In September, I got an email from apparently the company that bought out Modevia (I had been alerted this was happening) letting me know that they would be shutting down the server. CUt off. They did provide me a few days leeway to set up a new server. Now I jnow next to nothing about setting up web servers, but with some advice from The Twitter, set up a cloud based server at Rackspace. I got it going, but it was apparently not the most efficient set up, so Aaron kindly configured a new server. The thing is it runs a lot of traffic, and I am paying by the Gb. In two weeks, it's been about over 600 Gb of inbound and outbound traffic. The load crashed the server in week 1, and I had to double the RAM. If it is any measure of usage, the cache directory is cleared daily, and registeres at least 1500 different feeds a day it is serving, meaning it is used on at least that many web sites. At this rate, its going to cost me at least $200 just for hosting in September (for those who will chime in about their $15 ISP, keep in mind Feed2JS would choke in a shared server environment, it needs its own server). I can't afford to do this going forward, and unless something happens in the next few weeks, I am going to have to pull the plug on it end of October. I have set up a paypal donation form, and to date have collected about $70. But it really needs a major sponsor or some organization to take it over. I'm not too invested in running a web service. But I hate to leave people hanging- when the light's go out on the server, people's web pages will spin as it tries to load a script that is not there. It really is not the optimum set up that there is a single server; a set of distributed ones would make much more sense. So this is what's happening. I have placed a notice atop the Feed2JS site: This leads to a web page I made to outline what I have written here, along when three possible futures (see http://feed2js.org/index.php?s=support). Some generous benefactor is willing to cover the hosting costs. I am unwilling to inject advertising into the generated content, but there is no reason why this site could not be overt in recognizing this generosity. Some organization is willing to take over the management. This would mean hosting and also developing a plan to perhaps distribute the load across multiple hosts, as well as to party on efforts to develop the site. I'd even be willing to give up all ownership if Feed2JS is continued as a free service. Make me an offer. The free service goes away. I hate to see it happen, but this is a likely possibility. This would mean needing to find alternatives or look into installing your own local version- if you self host your web site, this is not that hard to do. See the Google Code site for all you need. I recommend this route anyhow as you will get much better performance from your own server. Also, I was a bit reluctant to do this because it suggests a possibility of what some bad person could do with a server, in that I have modified the central script to append a small "please support Feed2JS" at the bottom of all calls to the script (yeah it reeks of advertising): If you follow the link, it gives some info on how you can hide the nag message. It's not really that tricky. So why would you donate money if this might go away? I cant answer that either. I doubt a solution is running this on donations. But it would help me out in this lats stretch because IT"S COMING OUT OF MY POCKET and I DO NOT HAVE A JOB! Better yet, if anyone has connections or ideas for some generous entity that would like to underwrite this or take it of my hands- please contact me ASAP. I hate to kill Feed2JS, and frankly the code would remain available and open for anyone else to pick up and use/modify. Please, help me find someone to adopt my little project. Thanks. Update: Sept 28 I am happy to report some generous donations came in last night, with a notable shout out to Anil Dash for his personal email. I am about 3/4 the way to covering costs for the next 2 months and have a nibble of interest from 2 sources. We at CDB support the advancement of other dog blogs, esepcially as the number of Google-able cat blogs (6,040,000) appear to be ahead of the dog blogs (5,710,000). Therefore we share with your "Dog News: weird, inspiring dog tales". The Dog New folks have gone ahead and applied Creative Commons licensing to their content, so they are some savvy pooches. I like the disclaimer: Dogs don't lie: Reliance on the information this site contains is at your own risk. COPYRIGHTS ©2004 Dog News - Other contributors retain their own copyright. Material on this Dog News site may not be published or broadcast without express permission, except as authorized by the Creative Commons Attribution Sharealike License: in a nutshell, For Profit companies or websites do NOT have any authorization or permission to republish any of this site or its newsfeed. All rights reserved. Dog News is not affiliated with linked stories on other websites and is not responsible for their content. All links for news stories expire eventually... and we're too busy picking up dog poop to bother fixing them... C'mon dog bloggers, arise, we cannot let the cats rule! It's about time it went out on its own. Now serving random flickr images as pecha as it can -- http://pechaflickr.net. Have no fears, the old domain http://pechaflickr.cogdogblog.com/ should send you there too. I've been dog-less since 2008. There was extensive travel in those years and moderately extensive excuses not to have a dog. That phase is over as of today. Meet Felix, a 22 month old Australian Shepherd / Catahoula Leopard Dog mix. Yeah I had to look up that breed: Louisiana's "hog dog" is a jambalaya of native American dogs, Spanish Mastiffs, and Greyhounds. Catahoulas were created to track and drive feral hogs and cattle when it was time to butcher them, and not surprisingly they are aggressively resolute in their work. This tough yet strikingly beautiful dog can have a spotted, brindle, solid, or patched coat of many colors. Other outstanding physical characteristics are his webbed feet, which allow him to swim well and work in soft, marshy areas, and his eyes, which may be blue, green, brown, or amber. Some Catahoulas have eyes that are each a different color or "cracked" eyes: two different colors within the same eye. Befitting their heritage as herding and driving dogs, Catahoulas are wary of strangers. They're protective of their families and opinionated about who is and isn't trustworthy. People who live with them say they're excellent judges of character. Expect to provide this hard-working and independent dog with at least an hour of strenuous exercise daily as well as firm guidance during training. When their exercise and leadership needs are met, Catahoulas are loving, calm, and dedicated companions. Getting a dog was a plan I had with the prospect of the 18 month contract work with Creative Commons. I was going to wait... after our first May meeting in Washington DC, and maybe after a June trip for a week in Guadalajara for a second round of the UDG Agora project. Then last week, the thunderclap... thought "What the heck are you waiting for?" So on Monday I made a visit to the Humane Society of Central Arizona in Payson (30 minutes drive from here). Of all the dogs I've had, they were found (Dominoe), or from a breeder (Mickey and Cadu), or ones that someone else brought home (Skamper and Fresa). This was my first trip to the shelter, and yes, I left Monday without a dog. but I found two I liked, the second one I spent time with was Felix. [caption width="640" align="aligncenter"]flickr photo shared by cogdogblog under a Creative Commons ( BY ) license[/caption] I wanted to wait, some just to think, but mostly to prep the house. And I needed every possible dog item, I had nothing (a big trip to PetSmart). But today at noon, they brought him out for me to take home. [caption width="480" align="aligncenter"]flickr photo shared by cogdogblog under a Creative Commons ( BY ) license[/caption] I was super happy Felix hopped in the front seat of my truck (aka Red Dog) and was happy to sit there calmly on the drive home. We spent some time outside first, letting him get the sniffs of the neighborhood and the yard. And with good timing, today's DS106 Daily Create was to make a video about puppies (Felix is close enough). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SwxuRTEKWko Later we took an hour long walk. He's amazingly calm and happy for being tossed into a new environment. There's that unknown of not know what the dog's past is like, and the energy in the shelter is so manic you cannot judge all the nervous barking there. But Felix has been super affectionate, jumping into my arms even, we've done fetch, and he seems pretty comfortable sleeping now on new dog bed. He seems to have "sit" as a known command, and he walked well without too much pull. The few yappy dogs we passed, he became alert, but he was not charged up aggressive. He seems to be settled in nicely: [caption width="640" align="aligncenter"]flickr photo shared by cogdogblog under a Creative Commons ( BY ) license[/caption] I feel fortunate to have this fella around. Okay so I have made a namesake of dogs and use them as metaphors frequently. They are loyal and playful and fun yet so much more. A few weeks/months ago Mariana Funes shared this video of one man's experience with a rescue dogs that literally saved his life (warning, this video likely will generate tears): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rm0qYRWQpZI I'm not expecting life saving, Felix, just be your dog self. In my house. In my life. We some adventures ahead of us! [caption width="640" align="aligncenter"] Ir's been fun to do some redesign and alignment of the ds106 web sites. I've long had an interest in trying to make the ds106 Assignments site into more of a template that could be used to create similar sites, and that just got a little bit closer to possibility. The entire 106 fleet is a Wordpress multisite, the main site and the Daily Create site both use the Parallelus Salutation theme, so they were easier to coordinate; the one change was using incorporating the stressed 106 logo as part of the TDC. They both use menus at the top, and I've set up the rightmost ones to be "ds106" navigation ones. Your week of Daily Create Challenges is almost over. Are you still in it? Today is another audio one, "Flip the decibels- Make a loud sound soft or a soft sound loud" -- and very clever because the creativity is both in the choice and thinking about it, and the execution of it. While 25 people joined the Soundcloud group, as of today I see 12 sounds, which leads me to think people are still working on it (if they do not, the drill sergeant is going to make them run laps all night in the rain). I really enjoyed the variety here, and these are going to be very interesting media used for the final mashup challenge. A few favorites sit below the blog fold. (more…) I've been trying to use coComment, the tool that allows you to keep a record of your "distributed" blog conversations-- by activating a bookmark when commenting elsewhere, coComment stores it on their site,a dn then submits it normally to the blog you are jabbering about. This way you can track conversations by visiting your coComment page (or by using its own RSS feed). Here is a peek at my little bit of coCommeting: This saves the trouble of having to remember to return to a blog entry to see if anyone responded to your stellar remarks, and avoids having to get email reminders (and not all blogs even offer than as an option). The nice thing is in the view there or via RSS you can track the other responses, not just your own. Actually I am getting more use out of my coComment RSS feed in my aggregator, I have visited the web version maybe 2 or 3 times. I like it so far, but... I cannot always remember to hit the JavaScript bookmarklet tool to activate the coComment feature. My first two weeks my success rate was about 40%, and maybe now I am up to 60% or 70%. I would think this is a prime target for some clever coder to create a FireFox Greasemonkey script that would make it automatic (I know nothing about the monkey writing). I too am wondering about whether it makes sense to coComment my own comments on my own blog, since it has its own comment RSS. I am trying to coComment but am having trouble coRemember to coActivate the coTool. Maybe I need some coDependence. James Farmer has shared an interesting idea of building a collection of audio "readings" of articles, and Stephen Downes has taken the idea and ran it as an online audio jukebox. I'm not much of an avid reader of academic articles, so I let is slide into the "neat idea but no time to bother" category-- but did have the same thought Todd at Big IDEA had -- why not let a computer's text to speech capability to the grunt work? Sure computer voices are stilted, but surely better than my "um" laden streams, and who has time to sit and record? Knowing that Mac OSX has the ability built in to readily read any text, a little tap of the Google led me to VoiceBox, a $20 app that can use this built in ability to save a selection of "read" text to a .AIF file. And it offers control to change the pitch and the rate of the computer voices. Sweet. But it gets better-- VoiceBox has the ability to capture an RSS feed and read or save that! And you could, as the docs suggest, use their example AppleScripts to have this done on a regular basis. From the Realmac software site: Download the latest news directly into Voice Box using xml technology. We have inluded links to lots of valuable sites. For example, as Voice Box is Applescript compatible you could write a script to download the news automatically everyday from your favourite website and have Voice Box read it out or save it as a sound file ready for transfer to your iPod. I was hoping to play a bit more as this is the result of about 20 minutes of playing, but as a demo, I fed it the feed to James' Incorporated Subversion blog. In demo mode, it only saves the first 20 seconds as a file, but I got a 560k .AIF file which was crunched to 132k .mp3 with iTunes. James, I did the best fiddling I could with the "Fred" voice but there is just no aussie twang, but he does read your entry about wiki software... Here is James, (read by "Fred") - "What Do I Want in a Wiki?" Can it get better? Educators take note from the RealMac site: Free for Schools If you're a teacher and require a copy of VoiceBox for your school, please contact us and we will be happy to supply you with a free copy. What a deal! In response to observed, unexpected behavior, I made a minor tweak to our PHP script that does the RSS to JS magic, using JavaScript to embed RSS content in any page. The probllem was on the simple way I was naming my cache files (the RSS parser I use creates cache files to ease the load on your server)- previously it based the cache file on just the path and file name of the RSS feed, so in some cases people were getting feeds from other sites (bad). Now cache files are based on the entire URL, as to make them unique. The change would not likely affect someone running our PHP script to generate feeds from their own sites- it is more of a problem like ours, where when I cleaned the cache directory, I saw nearly 500 cache files. Your mileage may vary. It was one year ago today I did my first @dailyshoot assignment. I give my tip of the blog hat to D'Arcy Norman for turning me on to this. The theme one year ago was "water", and was assignment #12 cc licensed flickr photo shared by cogdogblog From the start I enjoyed the play part of the assignment- one could go literal (and I often do) and take a photo of a glass of water or a puddle or a lake..., but here I tweak on the notion of Arizona being a dry place (the broken box) and also this being the place where the water supply comes in my house. One year later, today, the theme was @dailyshoot 2010/11/24: Illustrate the process or thought of traveling today, possibly by documenting your own travels. #ds374 As I am not traveling today, I took the suggestion for "thinking of traveling" but photographing the corner of an envelope with the info for an upcoming vacation to Hawaii cc licensed flickr photo shared by cogdogblog So if you are in the dark, dailyshoot is a means to practice expanding your photographic skills (learn more at http://www.dailyshoot.com/). Each day they send out by twitter (actually it goes out twice to be more fair to people in other parts of the world) an assignment, a task for you to capture that day. Sometimes it is technique (depth of field, rule of thirds), sometimes subject matter, sometimes color. Your task is to post your picture to one of several photosharing sites, and send a twitter message with a link to your photo to @dailyshoot and include the daily assignment hash tag. This allows the web site to aggregate photos by the assignment. I already do (and have done all year) my own daily picture activity (2019/365 photos) for the third year in row. That one is really a matter of picking one photo a day that is meaningful or just your "best" shot. That can be a challenge for inspiration, especially, when, say, you live on 1/3 of an acre and struggle sometimes to find something new and unique in your yard. But maybe you tend to keep photographing things you know. That's why I love the dailyshoot concept- it forces you to try new things, and that is the kind of stretch that leads to improving your craft. I keep a home screen bokmark on my iPhone to http://twitter.com/dailyshoot, and try to check it first thing in the morning. If I have time, I try to get some shots early in the day so I have "something in the can", but at a minimum, I keep the assignment bouncing around the back fo my brain. There have been some tough ones to do, and I will admit that with 334 photos in my @dailyshoot bag, I have of course missed a few. That is another beautiful thing- it is really no big deal if you miss some. No one is checking, it is not a requirement. It's on you to take on the challenge, and if you are say stuck in airports for 39 hours, well just skip ahead. For me, the daily ritual of challenge, try, edit, maybe fake it with a clever caption, has been almost the one thing (well there's another) that has kept my balance and energy going this year. I certainly feel like I am a better photographer, but more importantly, am a better noticer of the world. I just love the concept, and look forward to another year of doing my @dailyshooting. Here is my year of Dailyshoot-- One of the social software sites I wish I had more time to delve into is 43Things. It is insanely social (in a good way), with all the pieces running. You have a personalized space, tags, rss, post to blogs, subscribing to flickr feeds, some sort of social FOAFing. If you have not been there before, it is a place you can list 43 goals, click and see others with the same goals. You can mark off ones achieved, and all of these can be posted to with blog like entries. Once a goal is completed, your entry goes in with the others who have done the same goal. The goals are listed on a tag cloud map. For example, last yuear I had posted I wanted to run a half marathon. So as of Sunday, I was able to mark this one done, and the individual entry I wrote is now one among 292 others who have this as a goal. And there is more, the concept is now expanded and interconnected with 43Places where you list 43 world spots you'd like to see, and then you can mark them off once you have bee there; again, it is tagged, syndicated, connected with others, ties back to your 43Things. And now the trifecta-- 43People, where you list 43 people you'd like to meet, and then mark them off once met, etc. This one is a bit suspect, as a large clump of the tag cloud lists people wanting to meet "celebreties", but hey, whatever floats your boat. Maybe next is 43Pizzas- I can list all the kinds of pizza I'd like to achieve, and once eaten, I can post and link to others who cherish mushroom-swiss-pineapple-shrimp-pesto?? The amount of interconnectedness and layers of this networking makes one dizzy. On one hand, I feel like I could spend so much time write goals, places, and people I want to meet, that I might not have time left to do any of them! I am excited to follow Jeremy's work on 43 Things Masters Thesis in Educational Technology: I pitched three topics to my thesis supervisor, and the winning one is certainly related to this goal: "Using social software as a method of identifying and collaborating on learning goals. 43Things is the most obvious application of this idea, letting users define goals, many of which are goals requiring learning ("˜I want to learn PHP and CSS', "˜learn to cook great vegetarian meals', "˜learn to record music on my laptop', etc) and then connecting individuals to others who share that goal so they can collaborate on achieving the goal together"”sharing resources, expert recommendations, online tutorials, links and comments to support each other. I think it's a powerful model of self-directed, self-organizing collaborative learning." And there are others who want to explore how 43 Things can promote online learning. And it gets so recursive, as he is using 43Things to document his research about 43Things... Oi, the levels of connection almost make my head hurt. But that is good. So is this structure, this networking useful? Or is it cool for the sake of Web 2.0-ness? What does it achieve? I am not criticizing, just curious where others think the 43______ approach runs up against things like the battleship BlackWeb.