CogDogBlog

On July 5, while most of America is recovering form whatever it is they do to themselves the day before, I’ll be strapped into a plane 15 hours to fly to Australia. Yes, despite whatever happened, whomever I coughed on, on my visit there last October they are letting me come back.

modified from creative commons licensed flickr photo by pierre pouliquin

This trip is with my NMC colleagues Larry Johnson and Rachel Smith as we go first to Melbourne to launch a new flavor of the NMC’s Horizon Project, working with a new advisory board of Australian and New Zealand educators on Horizon.au,. Out of this effort, we are producing later this year a Horizon Report specifically focused on emerging technology relevant to education in this region.

We are also going to Brisbane and Sydney, visiting in all, the 5 NMC member organizations in Australia: RMIT, University of Melbourne, University of Queensland, University of Woolongong, and University of New South Wales. There might be an intermission in all this to check out the big reef. And I’m looking forward to a beach walk and dinner meet up with a group of colleagues in Sydney, thanks to the choreographing of Angela Thomas for dinner and Sean Fitzgerald for the walk (i understand he has a blog They keep saying how “freezing cold” it is there, yet the temps don’t look that scary. Heck, I had almost snow in Arizona in summer yesterday.

So expect the 366 photo stream to shift from Arizona flowers and dogs to assorted who knows what I will see in Australia.

And so far, I am avoiding trying to toss out any cute Australian phrases. I’ve been told my attempts are lame I am certainly going to link to this video as an example of learning, instead relying on more trusted sources.

Okay, I am really excited about this trip! It took some restraint not to pack a month ago. We’ll be there July 5-20, and the blog and flickr light shall be lit.

And hopefully no one there will call me a drongo.

I’m not sure what to call the breed of web tools that enable you to draw in content from other web X.0 sites automatically– some call them lifestream (maybe not, wikipedia lands you somewhere else) more like http://lifestreamblog.com/.

Swurl is a new one and I am liking its elegance. I get my requisite custom URL and give it my username at a few web services, then I can toss in some customization like colors, banners… I just plopped the image I use from this blog:

What is less subtle is that there are no links to see more pages…. as you scroll down content keeps coming in, the river of stuff, like it has no end. Also, what I really liked, is that snce I gave it my accounts, some which have been used for a long time like flickr and del.icio.us, it goes way back in my internet life. I am looking at my tabs, and wondering what the heck it might have grabbed from 2001 especially since flickr was around only since 2004.

What subtle amazement, in flickr in found old photos that were taken in 2001 (from camera data in image?), and swurl is smart enough to find and use that date. Like see how hip I was in 2001 (not).

But what is very cool in swurl is the timeline view, which puts your stream on something that looks more like a calendar.

which also takes a long time to reach the end of the scroll.

I am not sure what/how I will use swurl, but that is the beauty of these sites. You really dont need to do anything to them once set up or pay attention to them, because the content is coming from your other web activities. And if swurl goes down in a big swirling whoosh! I dont really lose anything.

So before my swurl, there has been FriendFeed, http://friendfeed.com/cogdog which does a similar thing though it offers comments and “rooms”. And before FriendFeed there was SecondBrain http://cogdog.secondbrain.com/. And before SecondBrain there was tumblr http://cogdogblog.tumblr.com/. And way before tumblr was SuprGlu http://cogdog.suprglu.com/. And I am quuite sure there are many others (dont say 50, please, DO NOT SAY 50).

To me the lovely thing is that pretty much all of these are enabled by RSS or RSS-like communication, and manifest just what were pie in the sky dreams 5 years ago.

My own paranoia suggests there are eyes rolling out there when I dig back to my internet past, like talking about walking 5 miles barefoot through snow just to edit a font tag. But I marvel, because as excited as I was 5 years ago with the emerging web technologies, what we have now is far beyond what I could imagine.

It was 4 years ago at an NMC Summer Conference when Brian, D’arcy, and I tossed out the Small Technologies Loosely Joined concept — is it proto edupunk?

Collaboration via the net does not necessarily require monolithic, expensive tool suites that aim to do everything under one umbrella. We will share and demonstrate the use of readily available, mostly free, discrete sets of “small” and “loosely joined” technologies - weblogs, wikis, instant messaging, audio/video chat. The loose joining means that how they are connected are not necessarily in the programming of the software, but the ways people can use them in a social context that is an environment of dynamic, changing relationships and connections, rather than the rigid, limited ones defined by computer code.

What we were touting was so simple! Crude! Like stone age web. Web 0.9. It was a few MovableType blogs, UseMod Wikis, and some RSS trying them together. Smoke. Mirrors.

All of this plays out so easily now in these lightweight, easy, free web tools. We even tossed out ideas that all the energy focused on trying to build enterprise big iron ePortfolio applications might be better spent on something more like these aggregators that can automatically draw in content published elsewhere (don’t say PLE. Oops, just said it).

The thing is, in education, we don’t see much, any? utilization of this dynamic approach. There’s tinkering on the edges, but we remain wedded to Big Giant Apps. Expensive ones. Inflexible ones. It makes sense then that there are some noises on the edges.

Something like swurl may not be The Grail of lifestream or whatever you call this stuff, but to me, it offers a refreshing way to view dynamic, growing, changing content… that I pick, I control, and matters to me. Maybe swurl is my PL… no don’t say that.

If the web is at 2.0, then listserv technology must be at a fractional decimal too small to bother writing.

I first experienced them around 1988 as a graduate student at Arizona State University- heck it was even before full internet, as my email address was on BITNET. I helped a prof administer a listerv for volcanologists (no Spock jokes, this was geologist who study volcanoes). A lot of the duties had to do with patching together email addresses on various networks, US universities on BITNET, scientists on various government networks, and people outside the US on all kinds of different networks.

flickr creative commons licensed photo by rodliz

But the software, and the way it worked has really not changed at all. Listservs are like the rusty old pickup you see parked next to the shiny sports cars and hybrid vehicles - old, but reliable, and often just full of junk.

In the day, and I am talking about the day in the early 1990s, listservs were the place where online communities flourished (besides usenet); all of the drama seen payed out on twitter seems to have been done in email lists long ago.

And over the years, I have set up numerous web discussion boards, online forums, all kinds of alt-spaces, and for the most part they rarely show a pulse will people readily pound away at email to lists.

So rather than trying to fight the lists, I have been trying to use some tactics to make them more efficient. At NMC we have a very robust listserv, the TAB (acronym escapes me, something like Technology Advisory Board) that in our member surveys, is regarded as one of our most valuable services. Anyone from any NMC member organization can subscribe, and people are constantly asking for software recommendations, organizational policy, support strategies, etc.

One thing that happens, and the downside of email is that its not readily organized. Yes there is an archive,and its even searchable, yet I am sure a large majority of our users don’t use it or know its there. One strategy we started a few weeks ago was to monitor threads that were most active, and then collect responses as a summary we publish online as NMCTAB Summaries. Its not too complex to do, though a bit tedious as it is a cut and paste job.

Earlier this week a question came in from someone wanting to know what ePortfolio tools members are using, and if they were being used for the accreditation process. It is a legitimate request, though we had published a related summary just a week earlier.

The problem with these requests via a list is they generate a whole raft of responses. So to create a summary, one has to do a whole lot of copy pasting from email. And it floods the list.

Today I had a small light bulb go off that said it would make more sense to use the Google Docs feature of creating a web form that can be shared, and the data all goes to a Google Spreadsheet. I was aware of these, but had never gotten around to trying them out.

It is drop dead easy. You create a new spreadsheet, then go to share as web form, and use the tools to create as many questions as you need. Mine was short, the items- a field to enter an organization name, a text area to list eportfolio software names, and another one to collect info whether eports were use with accreditation.

So it creates a form that can be sent by email, or you can just share a link, or it gives code to embed the form on a web page. So all the back and forth of response on a listserv can be boiled down to one email with the link to the form. The beauty is you can allow people access to the results, but even more so the results are all there in a spreadsheet, not spewed across a pile of email messages.

I had about 8 responses within an hour, and almost 20 by the end of the day.

I’m eager to use the Google Forms even more for information we typically collect by email or shoving files around.

And the darned pickup truck just keeps going on and on and on..

As much as I like to poke fun at twitter’s reliable flakiness and curse the fail whale…

For inexplicable reasons, I stay. Again, twitter is not essential. My days go in fine with or without it. What value is it?

No… scratch all of that.

Twitter just saved me from a huge gaffe.

And it would have put web sites for lot of other folks in a spiral too.

At 11:30PM June 30, I scanned my Twitter replies tab (which was again working after about a week of “being stressed out”). and saw these two tweets from people I dont really know:

@oninformation and @mahlness were noting that my Feed2JS site (Feed to Javascript site, allows people to embed feed content in web pages) was going to a GoDaddy domain parked site.

WTF?

So I logged into my GoDaddy account, and holy crap! My domain feed2js.org was expiring on June 30. Today! Tonight! Or it had expired and was ready to go back to the big box of domains. I had thought I set them up for auto renewal, and the email I had in my GoDaddy account was one I rarely check (doh).

I quickly went in and paid up, and set up that domain, plus cogdogblog.com to auto-renew (I owe Steve Dembo a big thanks always for suggesting I get my own domain like 3 years ago).

But how lucky am I that some folks noticed. And tweeted. Would that have happened in another social service? technically it could but it did not. It was twitter, damn flaky, stupid flying whale busted function every day twitter.

Twitter, I can’t quit you, babe.

How about yet one more example of neat things that happen when you share your stuff? This is a photo I posted a month ago on flickr; it is a wooden drafting table my Dad had used back in the 1950s and after years of storage in an attic, I decided to re stain it:

Nothing special about the photo (except it had the word “drafting table” in it), just one of several thousand sitting in my bin.

I keep an RSS feed for my flickr comments so I know when someone writes something (so I can respond, or just so my ego can get a small stroke), and a day ago came this cryptic comment from a joe:allam:

Expect your views of this picture to go up drastically in the next few days.

Sure enough, when I went to check, it was up to 82, far above the normal views on my photos. And the number is climbing, notes joe:allam:

And now at 152 on July 2nd, 2008 12:50 GMT. Here is your reason enjoy.

The reason is my humble drafting table is playing a small role in a tutorial on the PSDTUTS site, Create a Realistic Blueprint Image From a 3D Object:

In amazing detailed, illustrated steps, Alvaro Guzman shows how to import a 3D model into PhotoShop, and manipulate the model data to generate a realistic looking blueprint image. He than shows how to make it look like a real piece of paper (with subtle shadows, folds, drapes) laid across my drafting table photo.

Now I have used PhotoShop for like 15 years (back to version 3.0), and realize, as always how, little I know, this is amazing techniques shared.

And now I am hooked on the PSDTUTS site, which is in its words,

PSDTUTS is a blog/photoshop site made to house and showcase some of the best Photoshop tutorials around. We publish tutorials that not only produce great graphics and effects, but explain in a friendly, approachable manner.

Photoshop is a fantastically powerful program and there are a million ways to do anything, we hope that reading PSDTUTS will help our readers learn a few tricks, techniques and tips that they might not have seen before and help them maximize their creative potential!

And once more, I get this adrenaline rush (woooooooooosh) from another exmaple of web serendipity that creates new connections, opens new resources, like new neurons forming and firing off.

Thanks for finding my photo and dressing it up! Up to 175 views and climbing.

As a hint- this pretty much was enabled because in my compulsive manner I title and add captions to all my photos that brought the photo up when someone searched on “drafting table”. Don’t expect much if you back up your camera like a dump truck to flickr and release a pile of ones with titles like DSCN2345.JPG - take the time to put some context there. I think in some circles people might call this “metadata” (I speed up this process using the iPhoto/Aperature flickr exporter, well worth the shareware).

But more so, just share your stuff. Its addictive.

Don’t ask why, but this snapshot I got a few weeks ago while Skyping with Bryan Alexander, or known to some as “Dr Nemo”

reminds me of the mashup I did a few years ago after meeting Doug Engelbart with a screen shot of him from the “Mother of All Demos”

Doesn’t Dr Nemo like rather futuristic? Or maybe I just hope someday I can get my beard to be that cool.

CogDogBlog Wordle by cogdogblog
posted 1 Jul ‘08, 6.26pm MDT PST on flickr

Wordle is a way cool visualization tool for making gorgeous tag clouds form text. Like many people, I did the easy thing first- a wordle made from my del.icio.us tags and then played with a not so easy to use tool to generate your flickr tags into text so you could "wordle" it.

So now I see the things I blog about… RSS, Blog, Spam, Learning, Web, New> Flickr, NMC… Hmmm what would you wordle?

Make Fresa Number 1 on the Pet Charts! by cogdogblog
posted 1 Jul ‘08, 11.28am MDT PST on flickr

I got a comment yesterday on a flickr photo of Fresa The Cute Beagle letting me know her photo was part of a contest at Purina!

Go Do Go

A call out to twitter worked well
http://twitter.com/cogdog/statuses/847766868

as long as the fail whale swims elsewhere, we are doing well.

From more in the “where would we be without the web” department.

I was chatting with a friend about movies, not a subject I can dare seriously enter with series film freaks, but in talking about “obscure” foreign films, I was trying to remember the name of a Russian one I saw a few years ago that was really moving.

So I go to Internet Movie Database, and I am stumped on what to search for as I cannot remember anything from the title or descriptive enough.

Next stop? The oracle.

As a shot in the search darkness, I google it. I know it was a russian film about boys and a father, it was black and white, and it involved an incident at a tower. So the magic phrase is russian movie boys father black white tower.

I should have pressed the I’m Feeling Lucky button cause the answer was the first one! The Return was the English title for Vozvrashcheniye.

Man, the tubes are on fire! I am sorry if this sounds like giddiness, but the sheer ability to throw a query out like that and hit a bulls-eye was unimaginable 15 years ago.

And while I am gushing, the a href=”http://imdb.com/”>Internet Movie Database, deserves a web hall of fame award for being around like almost from the beginning and being such a site with a rich layer of user participation (one can lose weeks reading the forums and bickering over plot summaries and analysis).

So whats your amazing google search story? You must have one! No? Oh well. Maybe its just me that gets excited this way.

I try not to begrudge what others do, but as much as I use (and talk about) mining flickr for creative commons licensed images, I dont know what to make of those who uses a photo sharing site to post photos All Rights Reserved?

Okay, I do begrudge.

But I dont spent much time there- what is more interesting, uplifting, is the magic that happens when you give something away, when you don’t attach statements of what you cannot do with media you’ve created, but attach statements of what you can do. I have pretty much given away every photo, crappy software, document I have ever created.

I gave away a picture of my old car in death valley and got a free music CD. I gave away copies of my old HTML Tutorial, a teacher translated it into Icelandic, and a few years later, I got invited to visit Iceland to do web workshops.

Its not richness of things showered on me that I value, its richness of people I meet, connections made. The more you give, the more you get. Just don’t stand there with your palms out waiting for it.

Recently I had lunch with Jim, a long time friend. He and his wife retired 2 years ago, and they each took up art. I recall Jim asking for photos they could practice from, so I sent my flickr tags for flowers and dogs, etc. I have a nice pencil drawing of good old Mickey (my yellow labrador icon), but Jim showed me some of the lovely pastels his wife has done– see the photo and the painting version below.

photo: (unknown flower)

painting:

photo: (detail of colorful bearded iris)

painting:

photo: (looking up from ground at blooming flowers of ceres cacti, note how Susan has reversed the image, a nice composition!)

painting:

There’s much more to say about working the art of those who come before, and it is certainly not anything so new or novel. Thanks Jim and Susan! I am honored you are using my photos.

Give stuff away and see what happens! And make it simple, go for a simple Attribution license (ducking from the barbs throwhn by BY-NC advocates!)

Flickr Wordle by cogdogblog
posted 29 Jun ‘08, 9.26pm MDT PST on flickr

Everybody and their mother blogger has noted Wordle, the lovely tag generator. I thigk I was one of the first to note it, but hey, who gives a flying fart about being web first except blog-o–ego-maniacs.

I only like email spam when it is creatively subtle in cleverness– this one comes close.

In this sneaky approach, the email references victims of Nigerian spammers with a supposed offer to submit for reimbursement courtesy of the government of Nigeria and the United Nations. So if you were really moronic enough to fall for an email scam once, this one can zap you a second time? Oh my, if you read it on face value, it even sounds legitimate .. well, except for them offering to feed me more modalities. And they got that hoodlum!

Oh and sure, government officials would certainly be contacting you via a Gmail account. Yup.

From: ” Barrister Jerry Williams” <compensationoff@gmail.com>
Date: June 29, 2008 4:23:43 AM GMT-07:00
To: undisclosed-recipients:;
Subject: EFCC And United Nations Compensation Committee
Reply-To: <efcc.un@gmail.com>

Attention: Beneficiary,

SCAMMED VICTIMs/ $1.5 million COMPENSATION-REF/PAYMENTS CODE: 01589. We were delegated by

Economic and Financial Crimes Commission [ EFCC] Nigeria in conjunction with the United Nations to pay 200 Americans,Asia,and Europe only, who were scammed by Nigerian 419 artists/perpetrators

You are listed and approved for this payments as one of the scammed victims.Your particulars was mentioned by one of the hoodlums who was arrested in Imo state Nigeria as one of their victims.

Be informed also that Efcc in support of the US secret service is already on trace of other criminals.

In view of this recommendations, I want you to know that during the last UN and EFCC meetings held this year March 20th,2008 at Abuja, Nigeria. It was alarmed vehemently by the rest of the world in the meeting on the loss of funds by various foreigners to the scam
artists operating in Nigeria.

Therefore, In other to retain the good image of this country, the president (Alhaji Umaru Musa Yaraduah) has instructed the arrest of any person or organisation involved in fraud and money laundry activities.And also the payment of $1.5 million to 200 victims.

In respect to this order,The Governor of Delta State James Ibori,the governor of Edo state Lucky Igbinedion and many other goverment funtionaries out of there generousity, have decided to join hands with the government for the payment of $1.5 million to 200 victims who can produce an evidence of being defrauded by these 419 artists.

According to the number of applicants at hand, 65 beneficiaries have been paid.we still have more left to be paid.

Please contact us as soon as you receive this email and send us the following for proper documentation:

1.Your name
2.Address
3.Phone number
4.Age and Marital status
5.Occupation

we shall feed you with further modalities as soon as we hear from you.

Yours faithfully,
Barrister Jerry Williams.
De-facto Chief Compensation Officer,
EFCC And United Nations Compensation Committee,
(United nations Anti-fraud Committee)

Thanks Barrister Jerry! You rock, man!

Check out the real web site for the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) — did they borrow that menacing bald eagle from the current administration? The mission alone is priceless:

The EFCC will curb the menace of the corruption that constitutes the cog in the wheel of progress; protect national and foreign investments in the country; imbue the spirit of hard work in the citizenry and discourage ill gotten wealth; identify illegally acquired wealth and confiscate it; build an upright workforce in both public and private sectors of the economy and; contribute to the global war against financial crimes.

I am trying to sort out how a menace is a “cog in the wheel of progress”??

PT Barnum is ROTFL.

Here’s another interesting tool for visualizing relationships in twitter, Jeff Clark’s TwitArcs:

I’ve combined some visuals from a side project related to linguistics with twitter data to create TwitArcs. It takes the latest 100 tweets for a twitter ID or term of interest and creates a list representation that has arcs connecting messages sent to the same users or that use the same primary term. You can click on the left side to load the tweets for a new user, on the right side to load the tweets for a specific term, and in the middle to visit the actual tweet.

Sure enough red arcs on length show people I “converse” with meaning the people who I tweet at or who tweet back my way, and blue arcs on right connect conversations by common words. You explore these arcs by moving the mouse down the page to hover over your old tweets.

The visualization is well done, eh?

But the way twitter has been coughing up major fur balls (or not even registering a pulse) lately, has me thinking future visualizations may arc more like:

Real Time Satellite and Space Shuttle Tracking by cogdogblog
posted 27 Jun ‘08, 4.45pm MDT PST on flickr

Nifty site for getting info about satellites and tracking them in real time on a google map. This shows locations of GPS satellites and my home location.

www.n2yo.com/

It is an understatement, but I was extremely ecstatic when I got an email in January from Jeff Utecht asking me if I’d be interested in speaking at the Learning 2.008 Conference in Shanghai. Must details got fuzzy as I thought about going to China.

So I paused an appropriate amount of milliseconds before replying with my “hell yes” message.

Last year was the first iteration of the conference, and I remember reading bits of the blog coverage, and liking the different ideas they had packed into that first version.

I was just listening to Jeff’s podcast with Ken Carroll:

Learning 2.008 Podcast

and am liking even more they ways they are trying to make this a different kind of format, with mixes of un-conference activities, hands on experiences, some Second Life-age, no paper, every session recorded/podcasted, and lots of social interaction. Oh, and they are asking the 8 presenters to do (among the 8 sessions we are supposed to do, is there a theme of “8″?), is to prepare a 7 minute “inspiring” opening session a la Ted Talk style presentations.

Oh, yes, I will pull out Al Gore.

Have I mentioned it is in China? I’ve never been, and just trying to think about an entire nation I know relatively little of is a bit.. well daunting an exhilarating. China…. Shangahai… I dipped into Tag Galaxy for an image taste:

This is all very exciting, because its going to be a swath of new educators I’ve never met before or have not swam in the exact same online circles, plus I am going all the way there to meet people I’ve read via blog but never met, like David Jakes, Ewan McIntosh, David Warlick, Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach , etc.

Have I emphasized this is China? There’s something going on there over the summer, some other gathering. Must be a popular place.

If the conference rings any interest, check it out; it’s on “The” Ning http://learning2cn.ning.com/.

I’ll be there wearing a grin and snapping a bazillion photos. And I ought to take up Ken Carroll’s message in the podcast to get in a few ChinesePod lessons before September.

China!

I love the cleverness of Ken Rodoff’s description of the teacher you don’t want to be in “an unexamined summer“. I’d say more, but don’t want to give it away.

linkribution across the seas to Graham Wegner

After waiting for a replacement camera battery and a new 8 Gb memory card, I was eager to try out a first Gigapan image. I was introduced to this nifty technology by Keene Haywood at University of Texas, Austin; since Keene knows the developer of the robotic camera control developed by CharmedLabs, he got me one of the last available beta versions of the device.

As background, Gigapan is part of the Global Connection Project at Carnegie Mellon University:

The Gigapan camera is a simple robotic platform for capturing very high-resolution (gigapixel and up) panoramic images from a standard digital camera. Sponsored by Google, CMU and the NASA Ames Intelligent Robotics Group, the Global Connection Project has also developed software which places you inside the panorama and lets you explore.

An earlier version of this imaging technology was developed for the Mars Exploration Rovers; the panoramas created from Mars enabled a simulated experience of being on another planet. The Gigapan project aims to create a similar experience, but for exploration of Earth.

The device created by CharmedLabs is a camera mount that sits on a tripod:

and is designed to work with pocket sized consumer digital cameras. More or less, the camera is attached to the device, you select the top left corner of a scene, and the bottom right, and using a zoomed in high res setting, the computer on the device moves the camera across, and up/down to take a series of overlapping images that are later stitched together.

There are plenty of panorama stitching programs; but most are for a single row of images- the Gigapan can do several rows, creating a much more detailed image too by shooting at full zoom. But that magic is when the image is loaded on the Gigapan site.

So today while I had planned a hiking trip for visiting colleague Westley Field, headed to the West Fork of Oak Creek Canyon north of Sedona, we made a detour onto the way into town at Bell Rock, one if the iconic Sedona red rock blobs. The spot we found best to set up seemed a bit close to the rock, but actually it worked out fine.

The set up is not too bad once you have done it a few times.

And it is fun to sit back and watch the camera move around and snap photos all by itself.

So my first set up panorama was 3 rows of 14 photos, and run through the stitching program, I got this image:

But the real magic is how it works on the Gigapan site- see
http://share.gigapan.org/viewGigapan.php?id=6288

Use the controls on the left to pan and zoom, or just use the left/right arrow keys to pan and the “+” “-” keys to zoom. As you move in, you get more and more detail. You can stop anywhere in the full image and click “Add Snapshot” which saves a “bookmark” of sorts to a particular detail of the scene, and you can add comments– annotating the image. But it gets really fun when you click the snapshots that others add, because each one will zoom you in/out to the exact location.

I’m excited to at least be utting this together, and now that I know how it works, its time to get creative with how this technology might be used as an exploration/collaboration tool.

Captain Westley by cogdogblog
posted 30 Oct ‘07, 10.50am MDT PST on flickr

Westley organized a great way to end my trip with this rowing expedition in the Sydney Harbour

I’m headed down to the Phoenix airport to pick up my friend/colleague Westley Field who I got to know last October during the Australia tour. Westley lives in Sydney and on my last day there, he took me on a special tour of the harbor. He makes a yearly pilgrimage to the US to visit schools and educators, and asked to pay a visit with me in Strawberry, AZ (way off the beaten track?).

He’s on his way to NECC after this, where he will be talking about Skoolaborate and other cool stuff…. and I’ll see him again July 10 in Melbourne as my NMC colleagues and I go there to launch the Horizon.au project.

We have no harbor or (”harbour”) here, but am hoping to get him on a kayak in a nearby forest lake.

In the vein of last February’s WordPress Dissection where I detailed the ripping apart and patching together of a WP template, here’s another bit if funny business I recently did in my favorite technology tool.

More or less, I have a main WP site, with a nested second complete WP site sitting inside of it, yet they are themed and connected to each other in away to make them work as one.

For the last two years, I have been running the NMC Campus Observer, a site that documents the projects and events of the NMC’s activity in Second Life. The design of this site is a blow apart of one of the more basic templates, Blix, as described back in May 2006 as Wordpress Theme Philosophy.

In 2006 there was not a great deal of things happening in education, and I spent a lot of time and energy writing, researching, interviewing, setting up events. The nice thing about the continued interest among educators is that there are many more events and things going on that would be if interest to them. And I am seeing less of a need for me to be writing about them all; over the years I did recruit some guest writers, but most volunteers waned after a few posts.

Lets put it this way- I just peeked at the users page of the dashboard, and I have 350 posts credited to me; the next person after that has 18.

I’m tired of blogging there.

But the ideal thing has happened, with the expansion of NMC owned property in SL and many of it leased to other educators, they are now more frequently running their own events. I’ve been interesting in finding ways for them to announce/post their events; using a shared Google Calender was not all that successful. I was looking for a tool that people in the NMC sl community could use to post their events and would generate an RSS feed we could display on other web sites, or in SL using some of the RSS display systems that are out there.

A blog software is ideal for generating the feeds, IMHO. But I dont want to give access to the main blog site. So that’s when a tiny light bulb lit up- what if I set up a second WP inside a subdirectory of the primary site? this way, it could have a different set of users, and they could only edit their own calendar posts.

I themed it using the same template, it it even draws random banner images from the same directory the main site uses. The top navigation needed to be hard coded to link to the same sites as the main one. So while the main WP powered site is at http://sl.nmc.org/ there is an entire second WP install in /calendar so this site, the NMC Campus Community Events Calendar, is accessed via http://sl.nmc.org/calendar/:

I simplified the right sidebar and had to hard code the top green links since they are not generate by pages in the new blog. The other subtle thing I did was to create two custom fields; one contains the slurl for the event location, and the second one is a date/time in Pacific Time (aka linden Time) for the event.

Then in my templates, it uses the custom fields to display the SLURL as a hyperlink and convert the time to a nicer display format and also link it back to a World Time clock to provide local times for an event. See the authoring guide I provide for our calendar blog users.

I had all of this working a few weeks back, but there was a major missing piece. If people posted their events in the interior blog, how would the info get widely shared? it’s buried. I did not want to copy the post and paste it in as a new entry. I could embed an RSS feed in a sidebar of the main blog.

And then I had a Jim Groom lightning idea flash — use one of those plug-ins he raves about to post form one blog to another. It was easy to find on of Jim’s favorite plugins — WP-o-matic, a tool that regularly checks an RSS feed for new content, and if found, it inserts it as republished content.

So now the main Campus Observer blog has WP-o-matic installed, and if it finds a new feed from the Campus Community Events blog, it posts anew entry to the main site. I have it configured so the title published in the main site links to the full entry in the Calendar site.

As an example, this post on Metanomics Season 2 was posted into the calendar site, and automatically republished to the main blog, with its title linked to the full story in the calendar blog.

Blog in a blog– I cannot vouch that anyone else might need to set up something like this, and likely there is some other way I could have rigged it in one blog, but hey, I was curious if this would work, and so far it looks good.

For people who mock web 2.0 (heck that includes me), look- you can make a world out of all of those logos! See the Map of the World 2.0, made of 1001 web app logos. This comes from AppAppeal a site that catalogs and reviews web 2.0 sites.

See you can do something useful with web 2.0!

I tried to locate my home in Arizona, which seems to be appropriately located near the logo for doof, an online game site.

Now stop making fun of web 2.0. I will if you will.