One of the extracurricular activities after Northern Voice included a quick excursion led by Jon to The Railway Club (a couple of blocks from Robson Square). We wound up sampling the überbrü - the Open Source Beer.
Brian had written about überbrü a while back, and I was intrigued by the idea - an open recipe for a brew, for sale only in local micrew bars (or at home).
Yet another good conversation, lubricated by a surprisingly good beer.
The best way to describe what hanging out with the Lamb/McPhees, Alan, Scott, Jason, and a long list of new friends is this. In a brief conversation with Patti this morning, I was telling her that I am rethinking everything I'm doing as a result of the amazing conversations I was part of since Thursday (including, but absolutely not limited to Northern Voice).
She replied simply "I've seen you smile more this morning than I had in weeks."
In my neverending quest for The One True Blog Management App, I downloaded the latest beta of Qumana. It's pretty cool. Cross platform now (well, MacOSX and Windows). It's got its own ad manager system, which I won't be using, but that's how they'll be trying to pay the bills.
The WYSYWYG editor is pretty decent. Haven't tried to break it yet, though. Let's see how it handles preformatted code:
public void Main() {
System.out.println("Trying out Qumana");
}Hmm... didn't handle that well... They all seem to bork on that.
Over the last few days, I've been privileged to be a part of some extremely interesting and engaging discussions about the nature of "blogging" in education. The Social Software Salon and Edublogger Hootenany sessions were incredible, unstructured, free-flowing, and unbelievably interesting. Essentially, there were no "presenters" and no "moderators" - both were completely open and lively discussions that I was lucky to be present for.
There were several recurring themes that emerged from these sessions, stated from multiple perspectives by several people with different backgrounds. Here's my Colesâ„¢ Notesâ„¢ version of these sessions. It's not unabridged, and if I'm missing (or misrepresenting) anything, I'm going to Trust In Blog that I'll be corrected. I'm sure I'm forgetting large tracts of the conversations - they were recorded, and will be available as podcasts as soon as Jason and Brian have had time to edit and publish the audio. In the meantime, the wiki pages (linked above) for both sessions provide some background (thanks to Brian for setting those up).
I'm sitting in Canada's biggest blogging conference, grooving out by hanging out with my blogroll. But the network's acting up, and I can't seem to check all of my RSS feeds, nor can I access services like email back at the U of C. I can see many sites, but UCalgary appears to have dropped off the net (from here, at least). I can post to my blog and Flickr, though.
Had a good flight over the Rocks this am. Too damned early, but them's the breaks. Took a psycho cab ride from YVR to UBC - cabbie using GPS mapping to find the centre of campus. Went for a quick walk to the lookout point over the rose garden (holy crap is UBC a gorgeous campus...) then headed up to Buchanan C Penthouse to meet up with Brian and Alan for the morning Pachyderm demo session.
Akismet is the "official" WordPress response to the soul-sucking rampages of blog comment spam. It promises to make spam magically vanish by harnessing the Hive Mind to banish spam en masse. But it doesn't work. I've been getting a fair amount of spam approved by Akismet as ham, when they are obviously spam. Not sure what's going on there, but I'd guess that since anyone can flag comments as spam/ham, that the spammers are getting in the game themselves. Total guess though.
As usual, Brian comes up with the best ways to evangelize and communicate about the wonders of social software and online stuff.
Three Amigo Camp will be running the day before Moosecamp, which is in turn the day before Northern Voice. On Thursday afternoon (Feb. 9), we'll be hanging out at UBC from 12:30-3pm, and everyone is invited to drop in and chat, show/tell, and most importantly mooch on some free catering.
This will be a "Three Amigos" (Brian, Alan and myself - plus guests) production, so expect lots of irreverance, jocularity, sarcasm, and twisting of metaphors. And free food.
There was a coComment invitation waiting in my inbox this morning. I activated it, and tested it out on a couple of blogs. It actually works! It provides a simple way to track comments I've left all over the place. Very very cool.
I do have a couple questions about the service though. It's provided by a Swiss startup company - so, will they pull a bait-and-switch and start charging? What are they going to do with the data? These conversation threads could be mined for all kinds of good/evil. Can we opt out of sharing some conversations? Can we delete (not just hide, but nuke from orbit) a monitored conversation?
I just saw a link to coComment (via an OReilly blog, IIRC - can't seem to find the link at the moment) It looks like a way to track comments that you make on various blogs, providing a way to keep on top of conversations distributed throughout the blogosphere.
I've been doing a low-tech version of this by tagging blog comments on del.icio.us with "blogcomment" so I can periodically check in on them. But this appears to but some intelligence, or at least some automation, behind the concept.
I finally got around to doing something with some of my photographs. Instead of just gathering dust in iPhoto, there are now a bunch of great photos proudly on display in our living room. We made a trek down to IKEA on the weekend (the same weekend when the rest of the province was busy intending on spending their $400/person "Ralph Bucks" peak oil prosperity cheques - so every store was insanely busy).
Zack Rosen just posted a comparison of Moodle and Sakai, based on some available online web- and project metrics (not an evaluation of the software itself). The comparison reads like something written by a Moodle supporter, intending to show how viable it is when compared with Sakai. It is viable, but language like "All signs point strongly towards Moodle kicking Sakai's butt and to the Mellon Foundation, Hewlett Foundation, and Sakai Partners wasting $6.6M" really isn't productive or conducive to an objective comparison.