e-Clippings (Learning As Art)

2007 edublog awards are now open for voting...and I'm torn

Hurry, hurry, step right up and cast your vote! The 2007 edublog Awards are now open for voting. I do have to give a big shout-out to Michael Feldstein for offering up my humble blog as one of his nominations (especially since Michael is a nominee himself!). Evidently though, I fell a few thousand votes short of an actual nomination but that's OK because then this would be even tougher.

You see, like any good incestuous community, I know and/or read a lot of the folks who have been nominated; especially in the "Best e-learning / corporate education" category. Clive's blog is great, so is Tony's and Wendy is a great, relative newcomer with wonderful insight into her daily worklife, I've read Susan Smith Nash's e-Learning Queen for a while and really respect her work and while I don't know Mohamed Amine, I'm sure he does great stuff too.

So who to vote for? Evidently this isn't Chicago, so I can't vote early and often...so I'll say two things:

1. People should look at the lists and vote, but more importantly than voting, visit those sites that you have ever been to.

2. Let's think about how we can do awards differently...now I don't mean some BS thing where everybody gets a ribbon for just showing up, but maybe we set a baseline and if you get so many votes, you get to display some sort of badge...I don't know the answer, I just know that there a ton of good, smart people in this community and awards tend to narrow the field vice expand the field that people look at. I want to both reward the hard, exceptional work of folks while helping to get visibility for the lesser-known or newer folks in our field as well.

Congrats to all the nominees!

Spyware Alert - Thx to D'Arcy Norman

A big shout out to D'Arcy Norman for noticing that Sitemeter (yes, I know I'm not linking to it..thats on purpose), a web site analytics tool that I also have been using, has recently begun "inserting cookies for an advertising company. These cookies are essentially spyware, used to track visitors across the internet by matching up that cookie on each site that is visited."

Like D'Arcy I have now removed the sitemeter code from this blog and apologize for any inconvenience. As D'Arcy explains "If you want to clean up your browser after Sitemeter, delete any cookies you might have from "specificclick.com" (I had 4 cookies from that domain, but I'm not sure if they were a result of Sitemeter tracking code from my blog, or from elsewhere...)"

Thanks for the catch D'Arcy.

UPDATE: So I thought I would also try to add Google Analytics to my blog and I just have to say that geez does those people know how to hide how you can find the code for your profile. Honestly, if the people who designed the help on that site had been the designers of the original Google page, you would have to make three intuitive leaps just to get lucky enough to find the "search" button.

Let's All Give A Warm Welcome to Tony O’Driscoll to the Blogosphere!

Tony - Congrats on taking the leap! You'll never be the same. ;-)

Everyone else - stop over and say hi (and subscribe) to Tony O'Driscoll at Learning Matters! Tony works in  Performance Architecture Analysis and Design for IBM On Demand Learning.

Tony already has an interesting post up about Second Life, one on the LCB Big Question and let's just say that Tony has been busy. I think we should all look forward to some great ideas and contributions from Tony (no pressure Tony).

Want a lesson on what can happen when you anger the blogosphere? (and you happen to steal pictures)

Here is the setup. This guy Kris Krug who runs Bryght.com and is a very good photographer to boot gets a note from someone saying that they think they have found a site which is stealing Kris's photos.

Kris tells the guy to take down the photos...blah blah blah..the thief actually has the guts to have some hapless law firm send Krug a 'cease and desist' letter saying that the fact that Kris posted about this theft and consequently said post now has a high Google rank, the thief's reputation.

Unbelievable right? It gets worse. After the 441 comments are posted to Kris's blog post about this, then it takes off on Kris's flickr site - where people start to discover that the thief had stolen almost every photo on his web site. The poor schmuck eventually apologizes and admits his wrong-doing after one of the absolute worst web-based pummelings I have EVER seen.   

CNET Video Tutorial: How To Install Wordpress

CNET has a great video tutorial for how to install your own version of Wordpress.

Typepad Mobile - Now I need to upgrade my phone

I saw this announcement that Typepad had created a mobile application that runs on Palm, Windows Mobile or Symbian and I thought "Huh. I have a phone that is none of those." So now I'm left to wonder how this app rates - anybody out there have a sufficiently advanced device that wants to give it a spin and send in a review?

New Widget maker - Majik Widget

It should be clear by now that I am a fan of widgets. I think that levels of granularity in terms of functionality is an avenue that we have not traveled very far down yet. Well here comes a new player...MajikWidget. They will allow you to choose from a library of pre-built widgets and put in requests for additional widgets. These widgets can then be dropped onto to your Web site or blog. This is a pay service and the widgets are embedded on your site - so those are two main differences between Majik and the other providers who are typically free and sit on your desktop.

I'm not quite sure how I feel about this. They are competing against a different group of folks including neomyz and bunchball. I think their product looks good and I like the flexibility of their pricing model - I'm just not sure it will fly yet and what happens if the company hosting my widgets goes away? I also think that there will be difficulty competing against the efforts of both Typepad and Word Press to enable and expand the availability of widgets on those blog platforms.

Blogging Demographic Shocker!!

(NY Times article)

"Bloggers are a mostly young, racially diverse group of people who have never been published anywhere else and who most often use cyberspace to talk about their personal lives, according to a report on blogging released yesterday by the Pew Internet & American Life Project."

No. Never would've thunk it.

Any federal government junkies out there?

So Tom Shoop is no Wonkette but I'll say that he is a darn fine writer on things federal and funny to boot (no they aren't mutually exclusive as has been suggested by prior research, just extremely rare to be found together). Read the Daily Briefing here.

Revealing Study About Corporate Penetration of Blogging

There is just NO WAY that I am going to believe that analysts are using magically infalted numbers!!

Here is the non-corporate view from the Pew Internet and American Life Project study on blogging. (BTW, that is a great way to drive traffic to your site - publish a report on blogging - I need to get on that!)

BBC article on MSN Spaces study.