I just found an old friend in the Blogosphere. I worked with davidicus in a previous life, at a dot-com eLearning/LMS/content company that shall remain nameless. He's now moved to LA, and is working for a Big Game Software Company. Coolness abounds.

Oh, and he's been blogging for almost a year, and I only found it just now!

He's a very interesting guy. Fun, challenging, intelligent and rare. The first time I went to San Francisco was with him, on a pilgrimage to the Mother Ship to peddle our wares. What a cool trip that was, staying at Grant Plaza (on the edge of Chinatown - it was a bit, well, dumpier when we were there. it's been pretty radically renovated recently).

OK. This is insanely cool. Check out the flickrGraph relationship map for my Flickr account. Dynamically generated flash concept map, based on the relationship data stored by Flickr.

Wow.

It's also done really nicely (try dragging a person's icon around...) Kinda like ThinkMap meets FOAF meets Flickr...

Fun things that you can do with metadata (without realizing that you're playing with metadata).

UPDATE: Wouldn't it be awesome if Technorati was able to display something like this for the link cosmos for a given URL?

I just found a link to QuotePlay. It's a flash widget for playing mp3 files over the web in a browser. Like, say, for podcasts...

Here's a link to my last podcast, playing in QuotePlay.

It will also let you link to just specific sections of audio (like, for instance, just the section about be babbling about folksonomies) using a built-in audio bookmarking tool. Very cool.

Looks like a pretty major limitation that it has to load the entire file rather than streaming it on demand, but that's a limitation of webservers, not of QuotePlay.

I just took a few minutes and built a simple MySQL table to store the 51 Dublin Core metadata elements that make up the "core" and "other elements". Except for elements that are dates, I used "text" fields for everything so that it can hold anything you can throw at it, while still being indexable and searchable.

I haven't updated the Lightweight Asset Manager to use the full schema yet, but here's the raw SQL to generate your own copy of the table if you want it.

Following Cole's lead, I added my own version of randomized banner images. I get the urge to modify the layout every now and then, and this just might cure that for a while since it looks different every time I see the page...

There are currently 11 images in rotation. Many were tweaked a bit to make the text a bit more readable over top of the image. All images were taken by myself, and the location is labeled. Most are from around the Calgary area, but there are a handful from other locations as well.

I'd played around with MarsEdit back when it first came out. I liked it, but couldn't justify using a client application when the Wordpress posting interface works very well. I see that Josh is trying MarsEdit so I thought I'd give it another go.

It does provide a handy way to manage multiple weblogs, and I have it configured so I can easily post to the PachyBlog as well.

UPDATE: It looks like WordPress 1.5 has fixed the issues with the XMLRPC interface, since MarsEdit is able to communicate with my weblog just fine, without requiring the xmlrpc hack I had to use before. I also just posted to the PachyBlog - something I hadn't done since September (oops). MarsEdit just makes it so easy (don't have to remember passwords - the KeyChain remembers all...)

Scott Leslie just posted about the new Dublin Core DC-Education Application Profile. Looking at the wiki page he links to, it looks more like IEEE LOM Lite than Dublin Core ++ but it is definitely good to see the DC folks thinking about some of the other potential uses.

I'll be updating the Lightweight Asset Management database to support the extra fields once they've been fleshed out or finalized a bit more, and when I get some time (it's currently a version 0.1 application profile - adopters beware :-) ).

Well, it's been about a month and a half since my last podcast... Lots has changed since then. Hear your protagonist babble on about folksonomies, loosely bound metadata, and the like...

UPDATE: Holy frikoly! This podcast has been downloaded 198 times so far! 748MB of downloady goodness. Good thing I get 25GB/month bandwidth from my hosting provider...

I just went to sign into my safari.oreilly.com account, and it was doing something odd... It somehow identified me as "University of Calgary", and was offering the entire catalog for me to read! Wow. What an awesome thing! I assume our library bought a campus-wide license (and the safari website must be detecting my IP domain), or, perhaps this is available for all campuses now?

Regardless, very cool! 1165 technology books available at my desktop. Freaking amazing! Thanks to whoever did this!

I've always tried - not always successfully - to limit the amount of time I spend in meetings. Time spent in meetings is largely time spent not being productive (with a few notable exceptions). Well, there have been some changes here in the Learning Commons, with the net result for me being - wait for it - more meetings. That would be fine, but I still have the same deadlines and non-meeting workload. It's going to be interesting over the next couple of weeks to find the balance.

I was just playing around with the Lightweight Asset Management thingy I've been working on, and decided to try something new...

For a couple of years now, I've maintained a quick and dirty website of webcams of warm places. You know, for when it's not so nice outside...

I took the URLs from that website, and entered them into the lightweight asset manager as regular old "learning objects" with Dublin Core metadata. Then, I whipped up some simple PHP to run queries on the metadata, looking for the geographical area, and type of resource (webcam in caribbean, for example).

I've been using delicious2Safari for a while now, and it's a really nice (and free) way to integrate your carefully tagged folksonomies from del.icio.us into your Safari bookmarks.

Combine that with Safari Stand, which makes an extremely useful bookmarks search utility only an F4 away, and I've got a very handy offline cache of del.icio.us bookmarks.

I've also got a shortcut in the Sogudi extension to Safari, so all I have to do when I'm online is enter "del whatevertagiwant" in the location bar of Safari, and BOOM - my del.icio.us bookmarks with that tag.