Facebook recently revised the terms of service for their website. They have a right to do so. I have a right not to like the new terms. Here’s the snippet that put the last nail in the Facebook-as-content-application coffin for me:
Licenses You are solely responsible for the User Content that you Post on or through the Facebook Service. You hereby grant Facebook an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license (with the right to sublicense) to (a) use, copy, publish, stream, store, retain, publicly perform or display, transmit, scan, reformat, modify, edit, frame, translate, excerpt, adapt, create derivative works and distribute (through multiple tiers), any User Content you (i) Post on or in connection with the Facebook Service or the promotion thereof subject only to your privacy settings or (ii) enable a user to Post, including by offering a Share Link on your website and (b) to use your name, likeness and image for any purpose, including commercial or advertising, each of (a) and (b) on or in connection with the Facebook Service or the promotion thereof. You represent and warrant that you have all rights and permissions to grant the foregoing licenses.
I just pushed the latest version of the WP-Sentry plugin out to general use on UCalgaryBlogs.ca - any site can now enable it to have the ability to create groups and to set the audience for posts and pages. A site admin can create groups and put members of the site into any number of groups - which can also be hierarchically arranged - and then the members can decide who should be allowed to see the posts that they publish.
I’ve been looking at various options for student response systems - primarily clickers - and have been quite frustrated at how that market is set up. I wouldn’t be able to recommend use of those, in good conscience, given the recurring costs. It also seems a little strange to compel students to buy a specific piece of hardware to perform the task, when they (almost) all have laptops and/or smartphones in their hands anyway.
Alan’s working up a 5 Card Flickr Story project to show at Northern Voice, and it’s a really fun little application to explore simple visual storytelling. Any photo on Flickr tagged with 5cardnv is sucked into a pool, where 5 photos are chosen at random and presented as a mini story. You can “keep” any of them, or roll the dice for a fresh batch, until you’re happy with the frames of the story.
I just registered to participate in the 2009 Alberta Ride to Conquer Cancer. It’s an epic 2 day, 200km bike ride in the Rocky Mountains west of Calgary, with riders raising funds to support the Alberta Cancer Foundation.
My goal is to raise $2500. But I need your help. If you can, please sponsor me.
I will be training for the ride, to build up to the longer distances and mountains that will be part of it. It’s going to be one hell of a challenge, but it’s also going to be well worth it.
I just cracked open the Google Analytics stats for my blog, and was curious to see how much data was available. I had it display all data (going back as far as November 16, 2005, which is apparently when I first started using Analytics). Google has tracked over 1 million page views on my blog. Over 600,000 unique visitors. The scale of that just blows my mind.
This article is making the rounds, and the comments on the Globe and Mail page are pretty entertaining. Professor Denis Rancourt gave everyone in his fourth year physics class an automatic A+ so they wouldn’t be stressed out over grades and could get into some interesting and meaningful stuff in the class.
I’ll be clear - I think that’s a fantastic idea. I’d maybe pull back a bit and make the course pass/fail rather than automatic A+, but I love the idea of nuking grades and focusing on learning instead.
I spent some time this afternoon poking around in the database that runs UCalgaryBlogs.ca to see if I could get a better sense of how it’s growing. Turns out, it’s growing MUCH faster than I thought it was (and I thought it was growing pretty darned fast).
It’s still pretty small scale, compared with giants like WordPress.com and Edublogs.org, but the growth looks pretty much exponential. I’m glad we’ve got lots of room to scale this puppy. And that campus IT isn’t upset with growing demands on database resources.
I’m going to be hanging out less on Twitter. I’m not deleting my account or anything rash, but won’t be accessing it from my desktop or laptop. Only from the iPod, where the drain on the battery will keep the nonstop twitterreloading in check.
I got tired of the noise, and the urge to check in on the noise. It’s silly, and distracting.
I’m going to be posting Asides more often on my blog - posts that don’t get published in the main feed, because they may or may not be relevant to whatever this blog is about.
Taking a photograph is more about capturing light than documenting a subject.
A simple bottle of pilsner, when placed in the bright morning light, comes alive with refractions, reflections, and shadows. It doesn’t hurt that the bottle is so beautifully designed in a clean and strong 50’s aesthetic with thick green glass and a stylized painted label.
It’s a little strange this year. I haven’t had to struggle to get a daily shot yet. Hope I’m not jinxing it…
I’m actually really happy with the project’s photos so far, and it’s fun to see the recurring themes both within the first month, and compared to the first month of 2008. About the same number of photos of the Bow River in Bowmont. Photos of coffee/muffin breakfast taken on almost the same day of the year. It’s kind of cool to see constants, and how they change over time.
Facebook recently revised the terms of service for their website. They have a right to do so. I have a right not to like the new terms. Here’s the snippet that put the last nail in the Facebook-as-content-application coffin for me:
I just registered to participate in the 
