Monthly Archives: February 2010

Feb 28 2010

Issues of Copyright

As you may know, I create a monthly newsletter as part of my means of supporting and encouraging teachers in their use of computers and software in the classroom.  On the front page, I use a Tag Cloud as a means of letting visitors to the newsletter site know what’s inside in terms of content this month.  It’s also a way to show people how to use the cloud as a way of demonstrating content.  Here’s last month’s.

Wordle_February[1]

That previous sentence was difficult to type because the terminology that I used, “tag cloud”, isn’t the way that I normally refer to it.  I would normally say “I use a Wordle” to show the content.

Wordle is an online “toy” that creates clouds of words from input that you provide.  The more frequently a word appears in a text, the larger it appears.  It’s really a visual histogram.  The developer, Jonathan Feinberg, adds all kinds of options for colour, design, and orientation of the text within the Wordle.  In education, the term “wordle” has become the term that you use when talking about tag clouds.

I use the service for a number of different reasons and follow the author’s wishes for attribution of his work in the newsletter itself.  Over time, it really isn’t needed – everyone knows what a Wordle is these days – but it’s a way of sending some kudos and giving credit to the author.

So, it was with great surprise when I went to http://www.wordle.net yesterday to generate a Wordle only to find the message that the site was offline until further notice.  Apparently, there is a legal claim to be addressed with respect to the copyright of the term “wordle”.  Until that issue is addressed, the site looks like it will be offline.  Tech Crunch has an interesting article here this morning.

I opened a search in my Twitter client to see how the world is responding.  The messages and support for the developer are flowing.  Good intentioned folks are offering alternatives services.

It will be interesting to follow the resolution to this.  Since this is a free service, you wonder if there is funding behind the scenes or will this be tackled with personal finances should it proceed to the courts.  Is the copyright holder seeking money for the term?  If so, how do you put a value on something offered for free?  Would copyright issues go away if the server was relocated to a country with different rules?  How fickle are Wordle users?  Will they jump to another service?  How many lesson plans scheduled for tomorrow will be affected?

Let’s hope for a speedy resolution.

Social Bookmarks:
Feb 28 2010

links for 2010-02-27

Feb 27 2010

Olympics and Technology

Wow, what a day at the Olympics for Canada yesterday.  I arrive home to join into a Twitter conversation with a group of like minded Canadian Olympic fans.  Of course, we were there for the hockey but there was Women’s Curling Gold match first.

I don’t normally think of curling as a high interest sport but this match was spectacular.  When it was over, Canada was second on the podium with yet another Silver medal.  We were witness to one exciting event.  Throughout, I’m in conversation with @aforgrave, @pmcash, @baded, @imcguy, @DoremeGirl, @ron_mill, and more I’m sure.  As an aside, I’m having a back and forth with @aforgrave about the technology that’s used to give the television viewer the “next best thing to being there” experience.

We’ve seen technology enhance sports for years.  The electronic strike zone in baseball; the first down line in football and the puck with streamers in hockey.  During this Olympics, we’ve seen stop motion in speed skating, overlay of bobsleighs from competitors, and things like markings in the snow to define paths and depths of field for the athlete and television viewer.  Instant reply is a staple in all sports.  As seamlessly as it seems, my son who works in the business, tells me that there’s pressure in the studios to get it right and get it cued up and on time the moment that it’s required.

So, as Andy and I were chatting back and forth, we noted that each of the curlers had wireless microphones so that we could hear the strategies and the instructors given to the team members.  Well, at least half of the game.  My knowledge of the Swedish language is limited to the chef from the Muppets.  But, the volume and enthusiasm is unmistakable in any language.  Certainly, this was enjoyable and enhanced by the technology.

But, I couldn’t help but wonder if more technology could have been used.

If you’re ever curled, you know that it is next to impossible to throw a rock straight now the ice.  The motion of the rock grips the ice altering the path and the efforts of the sweepers affect the rules of physics to minimize or exaggerate the effect.  It’s true testament to the skip that can orchestrate this as the ice changes throughout the map.

If you’ve ever programmed in Flash, you’ll know about onion skinning.  It seems to me that this would be awesome to incorporate in the televised coverage of Curling.  It’s appropriate too as Curling has its own skins game as an option to make the game more exciting.  So, why not introduce some skinning to the replays?

motion

For those new to the sport, it would greatly enhance just what is happening on the ice.  Curling is a hugely strategic sport and to be able to see the red Canadian rocks traverse the path would be awesome.  (Of course, they might not make that sharp a turn!).  For the experienced viewer, it would provide some insight to the game plan that the skip is calling.  It would also give us an idea of what starting and stopping and starting sweeping during a throw does to the path of the stone.

I think that it would be a great technology to incorporate and CTV, whose coverage has been superb, has all morning to work on it before the Men’s final later today.

Social Bookmarks:
Feb 27 2010

links for 2010-02-26

Feb 26 2010

The Down Side?

Over the past couple of days, I’ve been writing about URL shorteners and specifically making reference to bit.ly and ow.ly.  They are but a couple in the game.  There’s also tinyurl.com, moourl.com, Google has its own at goo.gl, and a site that claims to be the shortest shortener at 3.ly.  But, there’s lots of them.  There’s a pretty comprehensive list on Mike Koss’ blog.  Given this list, you’ll never be without one.  The list is a bit dated in internet terms so you’d be fooling yourself if every possible one was there!  

With all of the advantages of shorter addresses, click tracking, and so on, how could there be a bad side to this?

There are a couple that pop to mind.  First, all of these are just internet services.  And, so like the wind, they have the potential to come and go.  To that end, if you’re going to make this a serious part of your communication toolkit, you’re going to want to find something that’s tried, true, and been a good performer.  The stats at Koss’ blog should provide some insights to that.  So, there is a real issue if something goes away.  Related to the internet side of things, you are introducing an extra hop between the computer and the website so you’ll want one that sits on a pretty robust connection so that you’re guaranteed that you’re only inconvenienced by milliseconds on the way.

There’s another, more serious consequence of doing this.  As an end user, when someone sends you a link, how do you truly know where you’re going to end up.  For example, my friend, click http://bit.ly/cExuw6 to get rich or here http://bit.ly/a7lbLq to get even richer.  How do you know where I’m sending you?  Intrigued or interested to find out?  Go ahead and click.

Sorry, it was just a little mis-direction.  Intellectually, you might be a bit richer than you were a minute ago but your physical fortune hasn’t appreciated significantly.  However, it is a great way to get people to click into a site that you probably would otherwise steer clear of.  It’s a great utility for phishing the pheeble.  You see it pop up every now again on Twitter.  I received this invite a day ago.

Yep, I’m going to go through and find out what that is for sure!

What I really like is having the right tool for the job.  Bit.ly has one of the best tools I’ve found in this genre.  You can install it for Chrome and Firefox from here.  There are so many good things about this utility.

First, if you need to shorten a link, click on the extension to do the task for you.  If you’re logged into bit.ly, the analytics are all set to go for you.  If there is significant information about the site that you’re shortening, you can check it out right there.

Feb 26 2010

links for 2010-02-25

Feb 25 2010

Shorteners and Stats

Yesterday, I blogged quite a bit about my favourite way of handling long URLs.  I have a bit.ly account and use it quite extensively as my primary way of shrinking URLs and also for a bit of statistical analysis to just get a sense if anyone really cares about what I post.  My two primary ways of handling this is through this blog and through Twitter.

There is another option though.  A very powerful Twitter management suite is Hootsuite.  If you haven’t checked it out, you really should.  It’s designed for the hardcore user.  It has all the functionality that you would expect in a Twitter browser plus its own built-in URL shortener.  The shortener that it uses you’ll see references to is ow.ly.  Cute name, and consistent with the owl/hoot approach to to using the Twitter service.  One of the biggest advantages for me is that it is entirely web based and so I can fire it up as needed when all I have access to is a browser.  A great example of where it fits is on my Netbook running Ubuntu.  Rather than going through and configuring something AIR-based, I just use the browser.

In the big Twitter look scheme of things, it looks like this.

You can easily see that the message was sent through Hootsuite and that it goes to a weblink that is shortened by ow.ly.  Just like any other shortener, if you click on the link, your browser will hop to ow.ly to get the real link and then it’s off to the actual site.  It’s very slick.  When a user on the other end click, they go to the site but also see a functional bar at the top of the screen.

What this bar does is let the visitor know again who sent the message and that’s it’s from Hootsuite, but they can easily share the results with their followers, thereby spreading the good news.  If you need to make the bar go away, there’s an X in the right corner that makes it go away so that you can see the full screen of the site that you’re visiting.  You can also tell Hootsuite never to show the bar again in that particular browser.  So, together ow.ly provides a service beyond just shortening a link.

What about the sender though?  Remember that you’re hopping through ow.ly to get to the site and so it’s an opportunity to collect some statistics, right?  In the Hootsuite itself, you can configure an analytics program to gather the data for you.  As you’ll see below, Hootsuite comes prepared to use Google Analytics for the task.

For the originator, this gives the opportunity to collect and analyse all kinds of information about your link.

It’s another case of “the more you know, the more you know”.

If I’m a marketer or doing this for something other than personal learning, there’s a great deal of data here to help you dig into your brand and find out just what your trends and value are.

Digging into data and really understanding what’s going on is a fascinating task, if you’ve got the time and the need for the data.  Give it a shot.

Social Bookmarks:
Feb 25 2010

links for 2010-02-24

Feb 24 2010

URL Shorteners

If you’re on the web, you’ve seen them.  They take really big URLs and make them smaller.  There are a couple of really good reasons to do this.  For example, my blog from yesterday was located here:  http://dougpete.wordpress.com/2010/02/23/a-new-way-to-browse-bookmarks/ That’s a nice URL.  But, how do you explain to people how to get there?  It’s particularly challenging when you do it in a conversation.  Is that a slash or a back-slash?  (I never really understood which was which…)  Is that a dash or a hyphen (duh) or is that an underscore?  It’s slightly better when you send it via email or on a webpage as all that the recipient has to do is click a link.  But, even then, sometimes formatting in an email message breaks the original link and they’re stranded.

Fortunately, there’s a better way.  Using a URL shortener, you can take all of this long text and shrink it to something considerably shorter.  The exact same link above , using the bit.ly shortener is:  http://bit.ly/aLfFQi Just send that link to your friends and the bit.ly service translates the shorter link into the original large link and then on to the desired.  It’s a really slick way to handle things and make it easier to communicate internet addresses to others.  When working in a Twitter environment where every keystroke counts, it’s absolutely crucial. It’s very efficient and gets the job done nicely.

I use the Seesmic Desktop for my Twitter browsing and it supports bit.ly in addition to is.gd, snurl.com, tr.im, and twurl.nl.  They all do a great job and, in the beginning, I didn’t really care which one I used until I really discovered how this works.

On the surface, what appears to happen is that you kick a link, it takes an extra hop to go to your shortener to get the real address, and then off to the real address.  For most people, that’s probably enough.  And yet, there’s so much more.

Have you ever gone to http://bit.ly?  It’s a real website but you might be intrigued when you get there and see that you can “Create an Account”.  When you do so, it opens a whole new world to the concept of a URL shortener.  Remember that extra hop that you’ve created?  Well, while your clickers are making that extra hop, statistics are being collected about the link.

Over the weekend, I posted an entry called “A Moment to Learn”.  It was in support of the presentation that I gave at the OTF retreat dealing with Twitter.  I use Twitterfeed to scrape my blog entry to a post on Twitter and I’ve let Twitterfeed know about my bit.ly account so that it gets shortened there.  In return, I get some wonderful statistics about people that click the bit.ly link to get to the blog.  Here’s a picture.

bit.ly

So, at the time that I captured this image, 56 people had gotten to it through a bit.ly link.  (RSS and direct readers don’t get added to the total).  28 of them came from a Canadian IP address; 16 from the US, etc.  My friend @pbeens had twittered out the link to my presentation and supporting blog entry.  My other friend, @kellypower had retweeted it.  There were actually four instances on Twitter making reference to the original shortened link.

By consolidating my shortening to this one service and using my account there, I have greater insights into how any link that I post in this manner is received by those who care to use it.  I find it very insightful and certainly it’s easy to set up and use.

It’s well worth the time and effort to learn and understand.  You’ll understand better how people are receiving your content.  Ever the teacher, if you use bit.ly with your and your students’ web content, you’ll once again be able to illustrate that you’re not anonymous when you’re on the internet browsing around.  There’s a great deal of information that is shared about your browsing.

Social Bookmarks:
Feb 24 2010

links for 2010-02-23