insert creative blog title here » Technology

Screencast #1

shelby — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 14:52:38 +0000

As part of my final project, I created 3 screencasts about Delicious and how tagging can be used as a learning tool.

2009-04-29_1931

2009-04-29_1947

2009-04-29_1958

Dreaming about Delicious

shelby — Tue, 21 Apr 2009 13:39:05 +0000

Last night delicous.com was in my dream, which, while decidedly odd, got me thinking about some things. I’ve been focused mainly on the moment of learning that comes when a site is tagged, but while looking at my delicious tags, I noticed that they are also all connected to each other by their shared tags. For example, I tagged two sites as “web2.0″. One was the Institute for the Future of the Book, and the other was LinkedIn.com, a social job networking site. Both are rightly tagged as web2.0, and yet, we tend to focus the definition of web2.0 as that thing which it is related to in the tag, rather than the whole definition. In other words, when I see the Insititute for the Future of the Book, and its tag, web2.0, I think about how web2.0 and If:book are related. I don’t think about social networking and web2.0 until I look at LinkedIn.com, but both are part of the total definition of web2.0. By looking at the tags as a whole, rather than just an individual site and its tags, we learn more about not only the site we tagged, but also the meaning of the tag itself.

Unthinkable?

shelby — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 14:11:16 +0000

One of the most interesting claims made by Clay Shirky in his article is that we are living in the midst of an internet revolution. While I can see how the idea may connect with older generations, I feel that this revolution is not as significant with younger generations. As a member of a generation that has grown up with the internet, it is not unusual for me to use the internet as my first source of information for research and learning. Newspapers are quickly becoming outdated, but I feel that the current and future generations are not feeling the effects of this revolution because, in a sense, we were never connected with it. As a child, I only read the newspaper for the comics, and today, when news is important, I go to google news before I open a paper. For older generations that feel a connection to the newspapers, it is harder to let go, but frankly, from my own point of view, I find it hard to be concerned about the death of the newspaper.

The Delicious Library

shelby — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 15:50:52 +0000

So after talking with Dr. C about my project, I think I’ve finally got it. I’m going to explore taxonomy vs. folksonomy, specifically, tagging on delicious.com and how tagging organizes the web. Bush mentions in his essay the idea of sharing associative trails. To extend the metaphor, you took a walk in the woods and marked your trail. Now imagine that other people also walked in those same woods and marked the trail as well. You can then explore their trail and they can explore yours. Sharing the trail leads to new discovery and a learning journey. So naturally, you are wondering: how is social bookmarking a learning process? The learning I am referring to is not the journey on the trail, but something much more subtle and yet more powerful. I’m talking about the act of tagging. You may think it is simple, and in a way it is, but tagging is more than just a keyword, it is a connection, both a mental linking and a physical hyperlink. When you research and play on the internet, it is a matter of individual discovery. You are working alone, skipping along the trail by yourself, basket of berries in hand. But as soon as you decide to tag a website, other people become involved. One of the best features of delicious.com is the patterns in the trial. When you tag a website, delicious has a spot for you to write your own tag. A word that shows the significance or relevance of the website to you. But it also includes popular and recommended tags. These are more than just suggestions. These tags show the relevance and significance of that same website both to other people and to you. For example, you the blog of Jon Udell and decide to tag it “blog”. Then you look at the other tags that delicious suggests. You see technology, web2.0, blog, microsoft, programming, etc. Now the website becomes much more to you than just “blog”. You can see how other people view it; and can explore the idea what the blog is about, who Jon Udell is, what he does. You see web2.0 and think: we talked about that in class. You google web2.0 and the research process starts all over again. Then you tag a new site and new ideas form. It’s infinite and yet organized.

Gophers: Go for it!

shelby — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 03:23:08 +0000

So, sorry about blogging twice within a 30 minute period, but as I was deliciousing some sites, I came across the delicious blog which claims that it now supports tags for gopher. I assumed it was an obnoxious rodent, but in fact it is not. Its a whole other internet, only not but Cool huh? Anyway, so I started cruising through gopher, and I stumbled across the Online Book Initiative, a gopher site (?) that has posted a few hundred authors and their various works. It reminded me of when we were talking about tags and taxonomy on Tuesday, because it is arranged exactly like a taxonomy. Every author has a folder; they are listed in alphabetical order, and within each folder are sub-folders containing works and then text. It was all so neat and organized, unlike anything one would normally find on the internet, but it was also a very small selection of the books that are actually available. Hence, it was able to be so easily labeled and categorized. You can’t search for a book by category, you have to know the author, and click on his/her folder. Looking at it makes you realize the beauty of tagging, where you can search by a keyword, and author, anything really, as long as it reminds you of the website you’re looking for.

Is My Machine Using Me?

shelby — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 02:56:13 +0000

So the other day, while I was cruising around making wordles and delicious clouds (unsuccessfully! gah!) I added this experimental software to my blog from delicious.com that will create a blog entry of all my delicious tags and sites for the week. It hasn’t created one yet at the time I am writing this. I’m pretty sure I typed in that it would appear at 9:00 AM but that somehow morphed into 2:00 AM so who knows when it will appear. But it should be a cool experiment. So pretty soon I won’t even be touching my keyboard. I’ll just be napping while my computer takes over. Hmm…this all sounds eerily familiar…like some video we might have watched in class… Furthermore, in classic April Fools form, Google has “created” this feature called CADIE (Cognitive Autoheursitic Distributed-Intelligence Entity) that they claim will auto-respond to emails and type your papers for you. While it’s a joke, it made me think about whether a computer would ever really be able to think and write that way.

So let’s all reminisce about the beginning of the semester…

The Machine is Us/ing Us

Wordles!!!

shelby — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 17:37:00 +0000

Ok, so this might be the coolest thing ever. Ever ever. EVER. Even cooler than savethewords.org. Because they’re MY words. I made a wordle of my blog and it is so cool! Check it out here .

The Project

shelby — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 12:05:54 +0000

So I think I have my project idea firmly settled in my mind, and I have found some book search widgets that might work. I’m going to create a wiki, my only question now is how it’s going to look. I have an idea of what I want to be on the page, but I have no idea of how I want it to look. I want each user to be able to not only search for a book quote, but add a book, and have a page for each book that might show common phrase searches for that book, or something like that. I might also want to connect to Amazon, so that people can directly buy a book. Who knows? I’ll be honest, I really have no idea how to do any of this.

The Photosynth

shelby — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 03:31:09 +0000

So, feeling somewhat uninspired by today’s reading, I decided to cruise through TedTalks and search “most jaw-dropping”. By accident, I stumbled upon some things that we have discussed multiple times in class, specifically hyperlinks and Flikr. Photosynth, a Microsoft creation, uses various pictures found all over the internet and merges them into one picture with depth and detail. (If anyone remembers the photo from the Inaugeration, it used Photosynth) In the example used in the video, an entire, detailed 3D model of Notre Dame was constructed from Flikr photo images. In another, the view could take in a 3D panorama of a cliffside, almost as if one was standing in the middle and turning around to see everything. The beauty of Photosynth is that it can take various images and create a network of hyperlinks from image to image to create a network of photos. One could, for example, tag the various saints carved into the Notre Dame. In turn, each person on Flikr whose photo was used to create the 3D Notre Dame will also have those tags on their photo. They can then tag things on their photos that will link back to other users and so on and so on. The video was aptly rated as one of the most jaw-dropping.

McCloud Revisted

shelby — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 15:47:48 +0000

So after our discussion on Thursday, I went home and watched the TedTalk that McCloud had done that Dr. C. had mentioned briefly. Unfortunately, about 5 minutes into the 17 minute long video, it stopped working. However, the first 5 minutes gave me some excellent insight into McCloud. He began by talking about his father, who was blind, but managed to be a very successful inventor and engineer. As the talk progressed, he began to talk about other people who had overcome obstacles in order to create something great. The first people he mentioned were Bush, Licklider and other creative thinkers whose ideas all focused on one thing: computers. It seemed interesting to me that a comic book writer would be interested in computers, of all things. After all, it seems that something drawn by hand would be the opposite of what computers would be used for. Once it is computer-drawn, it loses the charm and imperfections of the hand drawing. However, McCloud is not focusing on hands versus the mouse, he’s focused on the way computers have brought comic books into the future. I didn’t think about this on Tuesday, but looking back, I suppose I should have wondered why we were reading about comic books in a computer class anyway. However, after watching McCloud’s talk, (at least part of it) and looking at some of his webcomics, I understand, at least in part, how the computer can be used to reinvent something like comics, which to the average person, seems un-reinventable (sorry, not a real word, but you know what I mean). One would think that the comic strip can’t really be improved upon, but McCloud proposes hyperlinks, 3D imaging, and other ways to break comics out of their original rectangular shape.