Awesome is the new WordPress app for blogging from an iDevice. Writing from iPod Touch on my home wireless.

“If I only had a phone…”

Note: Republishing in web as TwitterTools did not relay this post sent from iPod

Stand back, set the blog phasers on snark!

Before the rant starts (and if you cannot tell from the graphic above it might be juicy) for those that miss my not so subtle reference, do you remember all those times on Star Trek when they said, “Set your phasers on stun”? Did you ever notice, that they never set it on “annihilate”, “zap”, or maybe even just “tickle”? Phasers had pretty much one setting, which begs the question whey they had settings at all (besides the need for said script line). C’mon, my kitchen blender has more settings than a phaser!

My day started on such a roll! I drove down to Phoenix this morning for a dentist appointment, and I had no cavities despite being a year late for my six month checkup. An errand for some legal documents did not provide the hassles I expected. I picked up my old MacBookPro with the busted shift key and worn keys — I had forgotten to get AppleCare on it, but the repair cost only half the amount that plan would have caught. I then went to my yearly checkup at a retinal specialist- last time I spent more than 90 minutes in the waiting room for a 5 minute doctor visit, and this time I was in and out in 20 minutes.

On a roll!

So I was primed to drop in at the Apple Store at Chandler Mall and get me a new shiny 2G iPhone.

And the lucky sheen evaporated like water on the Arizona sidewalk. The store was mobbed, and I hovered around the phones expecting the usual quick response from the staff at Apple Stores. Nothing. I then heard an Apple guy say to someone else about a “line” and “just ran out”.

Here I thought a few weeks after the launch they would be no problem to come by. I tried calling the Apple Store at the Biltimore; first no one answered, then it was busy. I can guess what the calls were for. I looked up the number for the new store at San Tan Mall- their recording suggested checking an Apple site that would provide availability. That seems cool- I would know if there were phones w/o calling or driving.

Except the site says I can pick a state and city, but there is no menu, and it says I need to check after 9PM. WTF use is that? I’m not gonna even be in town at 9PM.

Hmm, so the Apple Stores were a wash. I next thought I might be able to snag one at at AT&T stores which seem to be second in frequency only to Starbucks. There was one just down the street! I walked in the store and said I likely had a popular question and pointed to the big iPhone sign. He shook his head before I even finished and said they were all out, but they could take direct orders and have it set up and shipped directly to me (”10-12 business days”). Since I drove 100+ miles to get here, that was starting to sound reasonable.

I then thought to ask about the signal strength in Strawberry where I live as I know their cell signals are weak here. I keyboarded a while with no reaction and then said, “We have no service there.”

“Well that makes this purchase decision easy. Goodbye.”

So not only cannot I buy an iPhone, even if I did I could not use it at home.

The luster has completely worn off the excitement.

What a luxury business Apple is in that it can pretty much shoo away people willing to spend hundreds for their devices and still rake it in. I have no conspiracy inkling of artificial shortages but the lack of products in stores weeks after a launch in these days of high fuel costs seems a bit smelly if people end up driving from store to store in vain. Walmart has this inventory fulfillment perfected- they never run out of toilet paper there, do they? Pffffft on Apple.

And their lock in to AT&T as a sole provider is appalling or worse. AT&T does these full page color ads in the Phoenix papers boasting how they have expanded their network in Arizona, with those bars superimposed on Monument Valley, yet here I am in a location where other providers (Alltel, Sprint, Verizon) all have strong signals and AT&T has tin cans hung on a tree branch. Pfffft on them. Wish they would spend advertising money on improving their infrastructure. Maybe I need to move to Mexican Hat where I could at least have a sight line to the AT&T Monument Valley bars.

I don’t really need an iPhone, though I was anxious to try all the shiny cool apps and start to use it for business travel rather than lugging a laptop, but am starting to think of looking at whats going to come around the bend, and maybe hang some hopes on Android.

I love my Mac, my iPod Touch, and see no chance of that changing. But this is really under my skin, and while it may be fun to have the cool device, I may just skip it out of stupid principle, until (a) it is less of a hassle to even plunk down my 300 clams to get one, and (b) when they break the lock of the AT&T pirate ship and allow my to use a provider that actually provides service.

Yeah, right, like I expect anyone to take up my gripes.

So I am setting my snark phaser on “disintegrate into tiny shreds”. Keep your distance, I am aiming– Pffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffttttttttttttttttt

photo credit: acme

Cheese, or more properly, cheese food product, is a wonderful thing. My head is not really exploding from web overdose, but for a break in the action, lacking anything really useful to contribute to the blog-o-sphere, I sometimes resort to the silly.

So a few days ago, I decided to spread some comment love by adding something completely irrelevant to posts form my friends. Sure its kind of like spam, but I know, even when I get a goofy off topic comment, it can lift my day. So I posted about 12 blog/flickr comments and a tweet for fun, somehow relating every blog topic I could find to the common world theme of cheddar cheese, and ending with the key magic phrase, “I can haz some” — the latter being a “tag” of sorts so I could see where they might get scraped in by google.

As of today, 3 days after the cheese a thon, google has 4 cheese comment sitings which, if I was truly devout, I might sweep into a dynamic RSS feed using the cool new feedmysearch site (twitterbution to Beth Ritter-Guth, thanks!).

I heard also of a study that cheese sandwiches are correlated with a high degree of intellectual acuity. Or perhaps correlated with hair on the toes. I keep getting confused.

Its a cheese world after all.

And it all brings me around to Grilled Cheese Pete.

In middle school, I got hooked on eating grilled cheese for lunch. You know those sandwiches, slathered in butter, with 2 thick slices of cheese food product melted to gold in between. One day, I ordered my sandwich, and the lady behind the counter turned her head to the woman at the stove, and yelled in a burly cigarette hasp voice, “Grilled Cheese, Pete!” I was strangely fascinated that there was a woman named “Pete” cooking in our kitchen, and I ordered them every day for a year.

I had a strange childhood, needed to get out more.

Hah! I bet I fooled you into thinking this was another rant against evil PowerPoint, eh? Nope, I actually just used it. Here is another series of loosely connected events I try to frame as a “story”.

I had seen, perhaps tweeted. that Slideshare (’the YouTube of PowerPoints) was running a World’s Best Presentation contest. As I like Slideshare as a web service, I smiled, and moved on.

Then a few days ago I got an email from someone I did not know asking me to vote for their presentation in said contest. This is typically an email that goes directly to the trash (do not pass go, do not collect my attention), but for some odd reason it clicked.

To quote Bill the Cat, my reaction was “Aaaaack” - the one I saw was so bad and smarmy I almost lost my breakfast. So I hit the button the banner to see the next entry. It was worse! And number 3 was somewhere in between.

Note I am not linking to these (but love linking to Beth Kanter’s entry- she had me at dogs, and hers is a winner)- no reason really to shame someone who may have meant well- but I thought perhaps they had mis-read the rules that this was the “Worst Slideshow Competition”.

So felt one of those urges of a blog entry coming… or maybe that I could craft something worthy.. not for the prizes (yuck, who wants a Mac AirBook?) (me) but just as a self dare to come up with something different.

Then the thought fled away for a few hours. Simmered. Percolated. Fermented? My mind wandered to the video a lot of people blogged about more than a year ago (I had not yet seen it, often I am a bit late to a meme)- Randy Pausch’s Last Lecture.

If you have not watched this video, stop reading my blather right now, close the window and go off and take in what may be the most inspirational presentation ever. His story is amazing as is his strength and passion for teaching. And living. I am not giving any of it away.

And then I thought, surely someone had done a riff on this like “the last presentation”. Nope.

Thus I found my hook- The Last PowerPoint:

The extra hook I was going to provide was adding a stream of running commentary in the notes field in PowerPoint, which I thought was uploaded and published with a SlideShare (am I totally imagining this was ever a feature??).

You see one of my gripes is that often people blog about or email a link to a presentation file and when you try to watch it, generally you find that the Presentation File is Not the Presentation — it often does not stand on its own, not without a synced or linked audio file, or alternatively, some captions or notes to contextualize the slides. This is compounded more by new styles that are largely graphic imagery rather than text (which is a welcome change), but s stream of funky images does not give me much information content.

So in my “Last PowerPoint” PowerPoint I loaded the notes with paragraphs, links, even some funny (I thought) stabs at Guy Kawasaki, who is a judge for this year’s contest.

I stayed up way to late finishing it, uploaded it, and Poof! There were no notes! All that extra snark went away, and I was crestfallen. Actually I just said frig it and went to sleep.

But I could not rest with my work partly done.

So to set up the presentation as I intended it, I posted it as a flickr set, with the full notes as captions:

Actually I like flickr as a slide show archiver, so in the end…

So will I win a contest? I dont care. I just wanted to have some fun. Will anyone find my humor funny? Also questionable. Did I really make a point or say something I really honor? Its awfully hard to even think one can achieve the things that Randy Pausch did– but as his better message goes, you gotta try, and those brick walls are there for a good reason.

The rush of new technologies is not quite so different from this image, appropriately titled Armageddon. Among my cloud or network, are colleagues wiping out and restarting their social networks, jumping away from twitter to avoid mcirothinking or just hating twitter, or just pulling in the reigns from every possible social network tossed at them.

I feel this same sensation on a periodic basis, be it a blog funk, or that general sit and pause wondering, WTF am I doing does this stuff really matter? And yes, quite often my head feels like it is exploding. Or I am drowning in open web 2.0 water. The mantra I have used is in the sense of “Being There” is to face the future with a wide eyed sense of wonder, even when it is staring directly into a firehose.

That’s easy to spout off standing in front of an audience with a cool image slide behind you. It’s another looking at overflowing unread RSS reader items, more invites to social network than you can even keep them organized in your taxed brain, not to mention prying time to even do the work you are paid for.

So I am lacking an easy answer beyond shrugging it off, unplugging, letting stuff slide, or just floating along til the groove returns. I am reflecting though on questions about how much “power” we acquiesce to technology tools- twitter by itself does not force us to ignore other outlets or think in bite sized nuggets, nor do other social networks by themselves draw us in like some gateway drug to some zombie induced web coma– somewhere along the lines we make choices to get subsumed (my hand is raised in a “me too” formation). Some however may argue it is close to addiction behavior– so how much are technologies responsible? I dunno, I am fishing wildly for ideas, push back, etc.

On the other hand, if some of the most sharp and clever people I know and respect find themselves overly immersed in something like twitter, what does that portend for the many more people who look to them for guides?

I propose no answers, but have heard more than a few people communicate a yearning for a healthy balance in online/offline lives. So is Web 2.0 a seductress who sneakily draws us in a stupor to their smoky dens or do we walk willing through the door? Maybe its time to revisit the Twitter Life Cycle Curve for dips, crevasses, or even sinkholes.

Hmm, in trying to find that last link in google, OMG, I am number one for search on twitter life cycle! Poof! Adrenaline rush! I am falling back into the purple haze….

In my continued exploration of new technologies, I am looking at a new compact, portable, cheap, information device that may offer a lot of potential for not only education, but society in general. Use of it requires almost no electricity! It offers in depth amounts of information in a refreshingly simple user interface that is easily mastered by learners of all ages.

They call it a “book”

Yeah summer break from (some) technology is just doing some plain old reading. How novel!

So, in the current thing I am reading, this description comes up- does this described a country you know?

The changing character of the native population, brought about through unremarked pressures on porous borders; the creation of an increasingly unwieldy and rigid bureaucracy, whose own survival becomes its overriding goal; the despising of the military and the avoidance of its service by established families, while its offices present unprecedented opportunity for marginal men to whom its ranks had once been closed; the lip service paid to values long dead; the pretense that we still are what we once were; the increasingly concentrations of the populace into richer and poorer by way of a corrupt tax system, and the desperation that inevitably follows; the aggrandizement of executive power at the expense of the legislature; ineffectual legislation promulgated with great show; the moral vocation of the man at the top to maintain order at all costs, while growing blind to the differences of ordinary life…”

Wow, does that describe America now or what? (my emphasis added)

Oops.

Not.

Off by a few centuries.

Guesses?

This is a description of the fall of the Roman Empire, in the opening chapter of Thomas Chahill’s How the Irish Saved Civilization.

I’m not about to steer CogDogBlog away from its duly self imposed charter to play with tech toys and post pictures of silly signs and rants about stupid companies, I am not going all political gaga in some search to do something– actually I am taking this moment to mark the sheer power of words and ideas in their lowest, most accessible form- text.

POT (plain old text).

I love new media, make my life around it, yet among all the neon Vegas glitz of flash-web2.0-user-generated stuff, there is still happily room IMHO for good writing or ideas that make you stop and think.

What can you do with words? It’s not just words, though, its what you can do with whatever medium you have to create ideas and nudge people to think.

Okay, I am losing all direction with this blog post, so am delving into my repertoire to find the closing stanza, ad re-affirm to continue my passion for (most of) the things I am passionate about that are not allowed on some trails:

Dancer by cogdogblog
posted 20 Jul ‘08, 11.34pm MDT PST on flickr

Its CogDog and friends night gathering at Almustafa, a fab Lebanese restaurant in Sydney

Leaving Sydney in style…

Actually the last night in Sydney was two nights ago… or tomorrow…. or I am #*&ing tired of trying to get time zones sorted out. It was more than a 24 hour travel journey from hotel in Sydney to LA to Phoenix and capped with a drive home to Strawberry.

But what a great time it was connecting with past and new colleagues and getting to see just a wee bit more of the grand Australian country (and cities). Twice as long in Australia would have felt like it was not nearly enough.

And Sydney is such a lively place, with our without the thousands of unexpected extra guests, though a few of my colleagues who live there refer to their living quarters as “grotty little moldy box hovels” (inside joke). I took maybe more photos in Sydney than anywhere else.

I was down under for two weeks for NMC related projects, primarily the Horizon.au meeting in Melbourne on the front end of the trip. The rest of the time was spent visiting other NMC members in Brisbane and Sydney with some needed R&R up in the Reef country north of Cairns.

And it was really not all that blogged, cause it gets, well tiring to try and write up so much, and taking photos is more rewarding. But I’ve got a string of things to back blog, so in true blog fashion, toss in reverse chronological order.

And for the last night, our colleague Angela Thomas had coordinated a casual meetup dinner at a great local spot, Almustafa, a Lebanese family style restaurant, which besides great food (the grape leaves were to do for, and I was popping the falafal like candy), erupted into loud music and belly dancing, and a number folks at our table were pulled onto the floor. I have some grainy video, but will hang on to it, thinking how I might feel if it were me in front of the camera.

So along with NMC colleagues Larry Johnson and Rachel Smith, larry’s wife, and Angela, also joining us were (oh, hoping the memory cells are working enough), Gary Hayes whom I’ve crossed in Second Life and blog space, a new colleague, social networking expert Laurel Papworth, my good friend, colleague and hiker Sean Fitzgerald (who looking to do something beyond ed-tech), media artist Kate Richards and Kerreen Ely-Harper (who is like a real star) who are working on an exciting SL project with us and Angela, Stephan Ridgeway who I met on my October trip (and who gifted me with sime great beer in giant bottles at dinner), Robyn Jay who I also get to know last year and was part of our Horizon.au board, the irrepressible and always active Alex Hayes, who was the wizard behind the curtain for my Sydney presentations in October 2007 and I think roped me into doing some future event, Illaria Vanni, a new colleague at UTS, Paula Williams whom I forgot how connected to our group but was fun to meet, Bronwyn Stuckey someone I have seen in other blogs and circles and was glad to finally meet in person, Anne Paterson who enthusiastically reminded me I met and forget her from my October speaking tour…and… and .. who the heck I am I missing?

Anyhow, what a great dinner it was, a bit hard to talk to everyone, but it seemed like a good time was had, especially for those that got a littler exercise on the dance floor.

It was perhaps not the wisest plan to have a last night party the night before needing to get up at dawn to race the pilgrims to the Sydney Airport, so my energy waned pretty quickly knowing what the travel day would include a parking lot jam in taxi getting to the airport, a long long check in line at Qantas, and the usual fun of being crammed up 12.5 hours in a confined economy class seat.

There’s more to back blog on the great Manly Scenic Walk (10k!), the projects we were working on with University of Sydney, the meetings we had at University of Queensland, and more of a recap of the Horizon.au meeting.

But I have a bit of jet lag to catch up on tomorrow (no to mention not having a crumb of food in the house or any clean clothes).

And as Arnold is prone to say, I shall be returning. To Australia! Ogs Pro bited!

Us Americans Appreciate the Traffic Help by cogdogblog
posted 18 Jul ‘08, 1.18am MDT PST on flickr

Look Right! There is a car!

Even after 2 weeks in Australia, I remain confused at traffic crossings- yesterday I cam oh so close to stepping in front of a fast moving bus. The horn blew and there was not even time for the life flash before my eyes (or there are not enough highlights to make a reel).

Sydney has plenty of these curb notes for Americans, supposedly left over from the 2000 Olympics. They probably saved thousands of lives.

And hopefully it is not a political suggestion

If you are in Sydney on Saturday and game to play dodge the pilgrammage crowd game, then join me and my NMC colleagues for a walk somewhere on a beach or around the harbor… er “harbour”. That’s th eplace with the funky curve building. I think they do art stuff there or maybe it is a fancy coffee shop (just kidding- above photo is from my first visit to Sydney in 2000).

My friend/colleague Sean FitzGerald is picking out some routes, and we’ll make a group decision in the morning for some options for long walkers or folks that may want to catch a museum. Meet us at Circular Quay around 10:30am Saturday. Okay, that is a big place, am waiting for Sean to identify a more discrete landmark, so either tweet me @cogdog or @sean… or maybe not the smartest thing to blog, SMS me on my aussie phone 04 3127 3616.

Weather looks like it will be sunny and ripe for photos, hoping to capture some good gigapan scenes, or failing that, a number of beer photos- would take some work to top the 3 from Port Douglas

Since I am just started playing with taking gigapan images, I was eager to experiment with the device on the trip here in Australia. I dont have fancy case for the thing- I am carting it around in the foam padded cardboard box it got sent to me. I am carrying it in my old backpack with a tripod strapped to the bag:

I had a small break Tuesday and wandered down Swantson Street to capture an image of the impressive State Library of Victoria– which always fascniated me with the little bit of Twilight Zone sculpture in front - at least I think it is based on the Time Enough at Last episode with Burgess Meredith:

So I tried first for a shot at the front of the library, but it was right into the sun, and I locked in a really poor exposure setting, and had to tweak images individually. I tried to place myself in the image twice, but was off location, so am there just once:

http://gigapan.org/viewGigapan.php?id=6575

I then set up the rig in front of the library looking across Swantson Street where the light was better, and got this image, which weighs in at 0.47 gigapixels, not even half a gigapan though it was compiled from 112 individual photos:

http://gigapan.org/viewGigapan.php?id=6606

I’m still learning a lot about using the rig, and am thinking more about ways it might be used with the annotation features on the gigapan web site.

Looking forward to taking more photos in Cairns, Brisbane, and Sydney.

State of the Web 2008 by cogdogblog
posted 9 Jul ‘08, 11.32pm MDT PST on flickr

What a great presentation of web trends, with extra snark!

linktribution to the Shifted Librarian

fun fun fun

Meeting Leigh by cogdogblog
posted 9 Jul ‘08, 1.33pm MDT PST on flickr

At the welcome dinner for Horizon.au, I finnaly got to meet in person, Leigh Blackall… now I am more eager to find my way back to New Zealand.

dirty wet rag by norwichforlife
posted 11 Apr ‘07, 8.26pm MDT PST on flickr

norwich state

Dispatch for Melbourne Australia, Monday July 7- Just arriving here in Australia has been both exciting and exhausting. I’ve done the long leg flights several times now (LA to Sydney and the marathon, LA to Melbourne) and am glad to say I am not “used” to it.

It is literally putting your body through the wringer, stretching it out, twisting it, and than tossing it on the floor. I thought I was in good shape having slept a solid 6 hours on the front end of the flight and some more naps into the mid morning.

Getting to Sydney was very exciting, though a bit clouded in and missed seeing much scenery.

It was a bit of a mad scramble, as the hour plus delay leaving LA got us into Sydney late, missing a connection to Melbourne, and the airport mobbed by hundreds here for World Youth Day. Barely made a connection to Melbourne (after waiting 30 minutes on the runway for “some other plane” to move out of our gate).

More to be blogged, but been very busy first few days with meetings, meeting people, meetings, and getting ready for the Horizon.au meeting.

On July 5, while most of America is recovering form whatever it is they do to themselves the day before, I’ll be strapped into a plane 15 hours to fly to Australia. Yes, despite whatever happened, whomever I coughed on, on my visit there last October they are letting me come back.

modified from creative commons licensed flickr photo by pierre pouliquin

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

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

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

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

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

And hopefully no one there will call me a drongo.

I’m not sure what to call the breed of web tools that enable you to draw in content from other web X.0 sites automatically– some call them lifestream (maybe not, wikipedia lands you somewhere else) more like http://lifestreamblog.com/.

Swurl is a new one and I am liking its elegance. I get my requisite custom URL and give it my username at a few web services, then I can toss in some customization like colors, banners… I just plopped the image I use from this blog:

What is less subtle is that there are no links to see more pages…. as you scroll down content keeps coming in, the river of stuff, like it has no end. Also, what I really liked, is that snce I gave it my accounts, some which have been used for a long time like flickr and del.icio.us, it goes way back in my internet life. I am looking at my tabs, and wondering what the heck it might have grabbed from 2001 especially since flickr was around only since 2004.

What subtle amazement, in flickr in found old photos that were taken in 2001 (from camera data in image?), and swurl is smart enough to find and use that date. Like see how hip I was in 2001 (not).

But what is very cool in swurl is the timeline view, which puts your stream on something that looks more like a calendar.

which also takes a long time to reach the end of the scroll.

I am not sure what/how I will use swurl, but that is the beauty of these sites. You really dont need to do anything to them once set up or pay attention to them, because the content is coming from your other web activities. And if swurl goes down in a big swirling whoosh! I dont really lose anything.

So before my swurl, there has been FriendFeed, http://friendfeed.com/cogdog which does a similar thing though it offers comments and “rooms”. And before FriendFeed there was SecondBrain http://cogdog.secondbrain.com/. And before SecondBrain there was tumblr http://cogdogblog.tumblr.com/. And way before tumblr was SuprGlu http://cogdog.suprglu.com/. And I am quuite sure there are many others (dont say 50, please, DO NOT SAY 50).

To me the lovely thing is that pretty much all of these are enabled by RSS or RSS-like communication, and manifest just what were pie in the sky dreams 5 years ago.

My own paranoia suggests there are eyes rolling out there when I dig back to my internet past, like talking about walking 5 miles barefoot through snow just to edit a font tag. But I marvel, because as excited as I was 5 years ago with the emerging web technologies, what we have now is far beyond what I could imagine.

It was 4 years ago at an NMC Summer Conference when Brian, D’arcy, and I tossed out the Small Technologies Loosely Joined concept — is it proto edupunk?

Collaboration via the net does not necessarily require monolithic, expensive tool suites that aim to do everything under one umbrella. We will share and demonstrate the use of readily available, mostly free, discrete sets of “small” and “loosely joined” technologies - weblogs, wikis, instant messaging, audio/video chat. The loose joining means that how they are connected are not necessarily in the programming of the software, but the ways people can use them in a social context that is an environment of dynamic, changing relationships and connections, rather than the rigid, limited ones defined by computer code.

What we were touting was so simple! Crude! Like stone age web. Web 0.9. It was a few MovableType blogs, UseMod Wikis, and some RSS trying them together. Smoke. Mirrors.

All of this plays out so easily now in these lightweight, easy, free web tools. We even tossed out ideas that all the energy focused on trying to build enterprise big iron ePortfolio applications might be better spent on something more like these aggregators that can automatically draw in content published elsewhere (don’t say PLE. Oops, just said it).

The thing is, in education, we don’t see much, any? utilization of this dynamic approach. There’s tinkering on the edges, but we remain wedded to Big Giant Apps. Expensive ones. Inflexible ones. It makes sense then that there are some noises on the edges.

Something like swurl may not be The Grail of lifestream or whatever you call this stuff, but to me, it offers a refreshing way to view dynamic, growing, changing content… that I pick, I control, and matters to me. Maybe swurl is my PL… no don’t say that.

If the web is at 2.0, then listserv technology must be at a fractional decimal too small to bother writing.

I first experienced them around 1988 as a graduate student at Arizona State University- heck it was even before full internet, as my email address was on BITNET. I helped a prof administer a listerv for volcanologists (no Spock jokes, this was geologist who study volcanoes). A lot of the duties had to do with patching together email addresses on various networks, US universities on BITNET, scientists on various government networks, and people outside the US on all kinds of different networks.

flickr creative commons licensed photo by rodliz

But the software, and the way it worked has really not changed at all. Listservs are like the rusty old pickup you see parked next to the shiny sports cars and hybrid vehicles - old, but reliable, and often just full of junk.

In the day, and I am talking about the day in the early 1990s, listservs were the place where online communities flourished (besides usenet); all of the drama seen payed out on twitter seems to have been done in email lists long ago.

And over the years, I have set up numerous web discussion boards, online forums, all kinds of alt-spaces, and for the most part they rarely show a pulse will people readily pound away at email to lists.

So rather than trying to fight the lists, I have been trying to use some tactics to make them more efficient. At NMC we have a very robust listserv, the TAB (acronym escapes me, something like Technology Advisory Board) that in our member surveys, is regarded as one of our most valuable services. Anyone from any NMC member organization can subscribe, and people are constantly asking for software recommendations, organizational policy, support strategies, etc.

One thing that happens, and the downside of email is that its not readily organized. Yes there is an archive,and its even searchable, yet I am sure a large majority of our users don’t use it or know its there. One strategy we started a few weeks ago was to monitor threads that were most active, and then collect responses as a summary we publish online as NMCTAB Summaries. Its not too complex to do, though a bit tedious as it is a cut and paste job.

Earlier this week a question came in from someone wanting to know what ePortfolio tools members are using, and if they were being used for the accreditation process. It is a legitimate request, though we had published a related summary just a week earlier.

The problem with these requests via a list is they generate a whole raft of responses. So to create a summary, one has to do a whole lot of copy pasting from email. And it floods the list.

Today I had a small light bulb go off that said it would make more sense to use the Google Docs feature of creating a web form that can be shared, and the data all goes to a Google Spreadsheet. I was aware of these, but had never gotten around to trying them out.

It is drop dead easy. You create a new spreadsheet, then go to share as web form, and use the tools to create as many questions as you need. Mine was short, the items- a field to enter an organization name, a text area to list eportfolio software names, and another one to collect info whether eports were use with accreditation.

So it creates a form that can be sent by email, or you can just share a link, or it gives code to embed the form on a web page. So all the back and forth of response on a listserv can be boiled down to one email with the link to the form. The beauty is you can allow people access to the results, but even more so the results are all there in a spreadsheet, not spewed across a pile of email messages.

I had about 8 responses within an hour, and almost 20 by the end of the day.

I’m eager to use the Google Forms even more for information we typically collect by email or shoving files around.

And the darned pickup truck just keeps going on and on and on..

As much as I like to poke fun at twitter’s reliable flakiness and curse the fail whale…

For inexplicable reasons, I stay. Again, twitter is not essential. My days go in fine with or without it. What value is it?

No… scratch all of that.

Twitter just saved me from a huge gaffe.

And it would have put web sites for lot of other folks in a spiral too.

At 11:30PM June 30, I scanned my Twitter replies tab (which was again working after about a week of “being stressed out”). and saw these two tweets from people I dont really know:

@oninformation and @mahlness were noting that my Feed2JS site (Feed to Javascript site, allows people to embed feed content in web pages) was going to a GoDaddy domain parked site.

WTF?

So I logged into my GoDaddy account, and holy crap! My domain feed2js.org was expiring on June 30. Today! Tonight! Or it had expired and was ready to go back to the big box of domains. I had thought I set them up for auto renewal, and the email I had in my GoDaddy account was one I rarely check (doh).

I quickly went in and paid up, and set up that domain, plus cogdogblog.com to auto-renew (I owe Steve Dembo a big thanks always for suggesting I get my own domain like 3 years ago).

But how lucky am I that some folks noticed. And tweeted. Would that have happened in another social service? technically it could but it did not. It was twitter, damn flaky, stupid flying whale busted function every day twitter.

Twitter, I can’t quit you, babe.

How about yet one more example of neat things that happen when you share your stuff? This is a photo I posted a month ago on flickr; it is a wooden drafting table my Dad had used back in the 1950s and after years of storage in an attic, I decided to re stain it:

Nothing special about the photo (except it had the word “drafting table” in it), just one of several thousand sitting in my bin.

I keep an RSS feed for my flickr comments so I know when someone writes something (so I can respond, or just so my ego can get a small stroke), and a day ago came this cryptic comment from a joe:allam:

Expect your views of this picture to go up drastically in the next few days.

Sure enough, when I went to check, it was up to 82, far above the normal views on my photos. And the number is climbing, notes joe:allam:

And now at 152 on July 2nd, 2008 12:50 GMT. Here is your reason enjoy.

The reason is my humble drafting table is playing a small role in a tutorial on the PSDTUTS site, Create a Realistic Blueprint Image From a 3D Object:

In amazing detailed, illustrated steps, Alvaro Guzman shows how to import a 3D model into PhotoShop, and manipulate the model data to generate a realistic looking blueprint image. He than shows how to make it look like a real piece of paper (with subtle shadows, folds, drapes) laid across my drafting table photo.

Now I have used PhotoShop for like 15 years (back to version 3.0), and realize, as always how, little I know, this is amazing techniques shared.

And now I am hooked on the PSDTUTS site, which is in its words,

PSDTUTS is a blog/photoshop site made to house and showcase some of the best Photoshop tutorials around. We publish tutorials that not only produce great graphics and effects, but explain in a friendly, approachable manner.

Photoshop is a fantastically powerful program and there are a million ways to do anything, we hope that reading PSDTUTS will help our readers learn a few tricks, techniques and tips that they might not have seen before and help them maximize their creative potential!

And once more, I get this adrenaline rush (woooooooooosh) from another exmaple of web serendipity that creates new connections, opens new resources, like new neurons forming and firing off.

Thanks for finding my photo and dressing it up! Up to 175 views and climbing.

As a hint- this pretty much was enabled because in my compulsive manner I title and add captions to all my photos that brought the photo up when someone searched on “drafting table”. Don’t expect much if you back up your camera like a dump truck to flickr and release a pile of ones with titles like DSCN2345.JPG - take the time to put some context there. I think in some circles people might call this “metadata” (I speed up this process using the iPhoto/Aperature flickr exporter, well worth the shareware).

But more so, just share your stuff. Its addictive.

Don’t ask why, but this snapshot I got a few weeks ago while Skyping with Bryan Alexander, or known to some as “Dr Nemo”

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

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

CogDogBlog Wordle by cogdogblog
posted 1 Jul ‘08, 6.26pm MDT PST on flickr

Wordle is a way cool visualization tool for making gorgeous tag clouds form text. Like many people, I did the easy thing first- a wordle made from my del.icio.us tags and then played with a not so easy to use tool to generate your flickr tags into text so you could "wordle" it.

So now I see the things I blog about… RSS, Blog, Spam, Learning, Web, New> Flickr, NMC… Hmmm what would you wordle?