I just got off the line with Cole, Alan and Brad - the ETS edtech crüe at PSU, where we recorded an episode of ETSTalk. I babbled for a bit about what I do here (and it was likely as clear to them as to me :-) ), then we talked a bit about innovations and the need to build concrete stepping stones to help people grok new stuff. I mentioned some of the projects I’m working on with faculty and off-campus folks, and we talked about reasons behind blogging (with me narcissistically remembering the story of how I started blogging, because of course everyone is so interested in that. rivetting stuff…)
I tried. I really did. I wanted to give Google Reader a full week to see how well it works as a full-time feed aggregator.
I couldn’t do it.
My morning check-in took 5 times longer than normal this morning. Google Reader seems like it would be nice for a small set of feeds, but it becomes unwieldy on my subscriptions. Endless scrolling, lots of clicking on folders, and waiting for items to be added to the bottom of the page, with no indication of how far you’ve come through the items in a folder (the scroll bar eventually becomes pegged at the bottom, even if there are 300 items left to read). And GR has no concept of a photo feed, so they’re all displayed inline rather than in a grid, making it take an order of magnitude longer to go through my Flickr feeds. Frustrating.
I had an idea on the bus coming into work this morning. It didn’t have caffeine applied yet, so it’s either less or more coherent than normal.
I was wondering how much of the patent brouhaha over the last couple of years (at least it seems like it’s been louder, or at least a bigger issue, over the last couple of years) is a result of companies filing patents to protect themselves from patent infringement lawsuits from other companies.
So, Steve entered the blogosphere today (as pointed out earlier by Cole and Bill) with an amazing surgical strike against DRM. It appears as though the Fruit Company only grudgingly went along with the bare minimum DRM in order to placate the music cartel into playing with them online.
In the very logical, concise statement, Steve lays his cards on the table. He’s all in. DRM is lame, and is nothing more than a tool for struggling monopolies to attempt to maintain the status quo in a changing marketplace (my words, not his. I’m paraphrasing).
I’ve been a raving, drooling BlogBridge fanboy for some time now. It’s the best darned desktop aggregator I’ve used. That hasn’t changed.
But, with all of the cool kids using Google Reader, I decided it’s time to really give it a chance again. I dropped it like it’s hot the last time I tried it because it doesn’t have a feed star rating system, nor smart feeds. But, it’s got a pretty flexible feed tagging system, which can be easily cajoled into performing these duties.
I’d been hoping to refrain from blogging this, since everyone with a blog has already posted it. But, I’ve been emailing and IM it so much that it’s just going to be easier to drop a reference to it here.
Without a doubt, the simplest, cleanest, most interesting demonstration of the meaning of Web2.0 I’ve seen. None of that old school powerpoint and slideware. This is more like “5 minutes in the life of Web 2.0”
I had a quick IM chat with David Gratton last week, when he was asking me what I thought of content package specifications. My initial from-the-hip reaction was along the lines of “gah! metadata for metadata’s sake” and that just getting content Out There was the goal, not encapsulating it in layer after layer of helpful metadata.
Then we spent a couple of minutes hashing it over. If there’s a requirement that a set of content needs to be ingestable in a system, a package begins to make sense. A system then only needs to know how to ingest stuff that meets a given specification, and all kinds of workflow opportunities open up. I’m skeptical about the benefit to the end user (students, teachers, etc…) but the value to the Institution (or higher) is undeniable.
I just got a phone call out of the blue from a representative at the Royal Bank Visa credit centre, asking me to verify some recent suspicious purchases.
My visa was just used to purchase $4 worth of something in Czechoslovakia, then $1500 worth of diamonds in Spain. Holy crap. She said it’s nothing that I’ve done wrong, that the Evil Thieves are able to get credit card numbers from literally anywhere (like, for instance, the huge database theft that hit the parent company of HomeSense, where hundreds of thousands of visa billing records were stolen, likely a few of mine in there as well).
Cole posted something yesterday about rethinking how he handles photos of his family on Flickr. It sparked something (as his posts often do) that I’ve been rolling around in the back of my head for awhile. I’ve put a whole schwack of photos of Evan on Flickr. Nothing I’d worry about the Evil Internet People getting their furry little paws on, but lots of photos of him doing all kinds of fun stuff.
We’ve been running a copy of Mantis here in the Teaching & Learning Centre to track bugs and issues in our projects for a couple of years now. And over the last few months, there have been a couple of accounts created per day in an attempt to proliferate spam. They create an account, with the URL pointing somewhere spamworthy, and then never post any content.
Does anyone know why someone would try to target spam at Mantis? I can’t see how that would gain them Google juice, so I’m boggled that someone’s taken the time to tweak a bot to hit Mantis.
Twitter is essentially nanoblogging (I just made that word up) - stuff that is more of a quick “I’m doing this right now” kind of status update rather than a blog post. You create a set of “friends” and get to see updates in almost realtime of what they’re up to. Right now.
