Blog Posts

When was the last time you wrote a letter?

It’s been so long since I have written (and mailed) an actual ink-on-paper lick-a-stamp kind of letter, that I almost forgot how to do it. It’s been years. I pay all of my bills online (and have, the better part of a decade). Cards etc. are delivered personally. Correspondence is via email or iChatAV or RSS.

I just had to send a letter as part of a travel claim, and it took me a while to remember how to do it. I remember waaay back to my high school days, where they teach you about the format of letters, and how you put salutations etc… I wound up falling back on MS Word’s letter wizard. Thanks, clippy (you evil sack of bits!)

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Feed on Feeds

I’ve been experimenting with directed server side aggregators to present the concept to a potential client. The basic goal is to provide something like EduRSS or the new EDUCAUSE blog aggregations for members of a department or faculty (or combinations thereof).

Feed on Feeds looks like a pretty lightweight and functional option. I’m running a test of it now, with a few of the Learning Commons weblogs (and those of the other Amigos so there’s something for the aggregator to chew on).

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Efficient Distance Collaboration

Josh and I (and sometimes King) have been utilizing a pair-programming-at-a-distance method of collaboration (not quite like spooky action at a distance, but sometimes it feels pretty close…)

Our magic sweet spot combo of tools includes 2 computers at each end of the pipe, one with VNC (a server at one end, a client at the other), and the other computer acting as “support”, with iChatAV acting as our communications bridge, and various browsers and utilities handy on the non-shared screen. We leave an iChat video connection open, so we can communicate without having to stop editing source code to enter chat mode. This rocks nicely.

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EDUCAUSE Blogs

Not sure how I missed this, but I just came across the EDUCAUSE | Blogs site-within-a-site while surfing Feedster to get the latest stuff from the Educause 2004 conference.

I had no idea that Cyprien Lomas was blogging - met him at the NMC2004 Summer Conference at 2004, and I’ll definitely be following his blog…

The Educause Blog site looks to be pretty much what a department would need to use in order to officially adopt blogging as part of their website - a collection of bloggers and categories, with the ability to view individual bloggers or categories, or collections of any combination thereof. Very nice. They don’t say what software they’re using, so I don’t know if it’s WP, MT, or if they rolled their own…

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2 Amigos at Educause

I completely forgot about the 2 Amigos at Educause! It was originally a “3 Amigos Production”, but that’s a long story. Alan and Brian made the trek to Denver, and it sounded like fun of course!

The presentation wiki is available as well. Links to other stuff are available via Alan’s description of the presentation.

This Rip, mix & feed style of dealing with resources (content, learning objects, whatever) is very cool. Using small pieces loosely joined…

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Google Adsense Removed

I just nuked the Google Adsense stuff from this weblog. I had added it to see how it did with analyzing the content of various pages (along the lines of the bags-of-keywords and content-indexing memes with respect to learning objects and metadata).

The experiment was actually quite interesting and informative. Conclusions:

  • It is definitely possible to effectively match content (ads) with other content (weblog posts) based on the bits within that content (and not on keywords or taxonomies applied to the outside of said content).
  • The matches between content and ads are often extremely accurate, but lag by a couple of days as Google updates indexes and caches. New posts tend to have a quasi-generic ad for a day or so, and then a “real” ad kicks in
  • Readers of this weblog (perhaps/not weblogs in general?) are rather task-oriented folks. They don’t get distracted by ads - they are apparently here to read stuff, and don’t tend to click on ads
  • As a result of the previous point, Adsense isn’t a viable revenue source. It wasn’t intended to be - I would have donated any revenue to the Breast Cancer Foundation - but over the past several months, Adsense tracked a grand total of less than $10US. They don’t pay until you hit $100US, so I would have to keep ads running for almost 2 years to see a dime from Adsense. The Adsense EULA prevents me from publishing specific details on success rates (CPM, etc..) but they were substantially less than stellar. ;-)

By the way, the conclusion of this experiment was triggered by the IT Conversations: The Future of Online Advertising (at Gnomedex 4.0) session. They got talking about “monetizing content from weblogs” and adding ads to rss feeds. It left such a bad taste in my mouth that I couldn’t continue with Adsense. The talk was quite interesting (with folks from Google, Amazon, etc… talking about what they do and where they are going), but a wee bit scary.

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Changing role of metadata

Scott Leslie just pointed me to a Erik Duval’s weblog which points to a couple of presentations from the Dublin Core 2004 Conference in Shanghai.

I’d missed these links when Erik first posted them (the “DC2004” title didn’t grab me - doh!) but man, are they great presentations (well, the .ppt files are great anyway - I can only assume the presentations were better!)

They are basically talking about the changing role of metadata - how the html entry form is dead/useless for this. How multiple simultaneous metadata descriptions of resources are encouraged. Using multiple metadata schemas (LOM, MPEG, DC, whatever), as part of an active workflow rather than an ordained-from-above authoritative approach. About learning from cool new tools like Flickr, del.icio.us, gmail, etc…

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Feed2JS available for University of Calgary users

After a meeting we had on Tuesday, where I demoed Alan’s Ocotillo “control panel”, I decided I needed to reinstall feed2js on our server so we could do something similar for a project.

Last time I installed it, I made it freely available for anyone, and it wound up running news feeds for a German dating service, and a gun club, and several other questionable (and definitely non-academic, and certainly non-UofC) uses. These users were hammering our server, using resources that are needed for “official” purposes.

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iTMS Finally Coming to Canada?

Great. The National Post has an article suggesting the iTMS will open in Canada on November 28th (I’d link to them for posterity, but someone needs to hit the National Post with a cluestick - their website is useless to me if I have to be a paid subscriber of their dead-tree version to read stuff on it).

I’m so totally hooked on ITConversations, and I’m a little nervous about what will happen to my credit rating if it becomes easy for me to get quality audiobooks for the iPod…

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Pachyderm Extreme Programming Redux

Josh, King and I are continuing work on the Pachyderm Authoring Application. We just got a distance collaboration setup going that works really well. We use VNC to share a computer (my TiBook), iChatAV for an open audio channel, and Breeze Live for a shared whiteboard. This is working almost as well as when Josh flew up to Calgary for a week. I think we’ll be able to get much more done this way. And it’s more fun, too…

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