Archive for February, 2009

Wednesday, February 25th, 2009

Thing 12: Wikis

I started contributing to Wikipedia way back in 2001, when it was on much older crufty software and took up hardly any disk space at all; the rules then were still in flux and one of the ones you could trot out in a disagreement was “ignore all rules.” Somewhere along the line I [...]

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Monday, February 23rd, 2009

Thing X: Night of the Living Mashups

Now this is how mashups should be done:
Purdue has taken Google Maps data and combined it with data on CO2 production. You can check absolute values and per capita, by state and by county.
I don’t know much about maps but this is very interesting: a great way to visualize the data so that it’s [...]

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Monday, February 23rd, 2009

Thing 11: Social Media

Digg:
Went to digg. Clicked “most popular” then “last 30 days.” Top “story”: screengrabs of someone posting “IS THIS REAL LIFE?” then a response “Is this just fantasy?” followed by several posts giving the entirety of the lyrics (and some instrumentation) of “Bohemian Rhapsody.”
Huh. So what’s the second thing I most needed to [...]

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Friday, February 20th, 2009

Thing 10: Tagging and del.icio.us

I love tagging in general and think it usually works well enough even without a controlled vocabulary. Folksonomies have disadvantages, of course, especially in their imprecision–users might get both horses and cars under “mustang”–but the advantage in comparison to cataloging with a controlled vocabulary is that people tend to use terms that most other [...]

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Thursday, February 19th, 2009

Thing 9: Sharing - slides, photos, databases (redux)

Erin found a site called Blist that lets you create and share databases, for free, online. I set up an account and tried it out (didn’t enter much data–just wanted some experience with it) and found it to have a very intuitive interface.
I won’t continue with that database (allconsuming.net already does the same thing, [...]

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Wednesday, February 18th, 2009

Thing 9: Sharing - slides, photos, databases

Create and Share Slideshows
I imported a PowerPoint presentation I’d made earlier about graphic novels for teens and/or graphic novels that teens read. Importing the file was straightforward, certainly simpler than learning how to make a presentation using a new interface.
Sharing Photos
I might try this one later. I might not. I’m a tempeh [...]

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Tuesday, February 10th, 2009

Thing 8: Communication - Web 2.0 Style

IM:
I’ve been using IM for over 10 years: I had experience with AIM in 1998 and over the years have used Yahoo’s and Google’s chats as well as ICQ. Because of the number of accounts on different services, I switched to Trillian early on (back when AOL kept changing things to break the unauthorized [...]

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Tuesday, February 10th, 2009

Thing 7: Online Image Generators

I tried several different sites for this one.
First I tried a Holiday Monster generator, which I liked until it insisted on adding a message, my name and email, and my friend’s name and email. I used @example.com, just to allow the form to validate (all emails to that domain are automatically discarded), but there [...]

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Tuesday, February 10th, 2009

Thing 6: Flickr mashups redux

Oh, these last few weeks….

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