This is just a quick post to share something I found very interesting and well written — even if it does come from the (fake) Secret Diary of Steve Jobs.  The post, “Why the mainstream media is dying” shares a tale of how the blogosphere can go after a story unencumbered, while someone as powerful as the NY Times can simply move right on by.  Not sure I totally agree that once the newspapers are gone we won’t notice, but I will say that the landscape is moving so quickly under our feet that we may not have time to care.  I don’t know, but I thought it was a terrific...

Is the Miniposts plugin an easy solution to posting lots of stuff and not having it show up in the body of the blog? Perhaps. Some testing is required.

I’ve noticed that Twitter has been replacing my daily RSS feed reader activities. I’m not at my desk enough to keep Twitter open all day, but do find moments to jump in and review the last couple hours worth of conversations. When I do this I am always prompted to click on things people I care about find interesting. I don’t need to use digg or something like stumble upon as I have what I think is the most powerful (and targeted) recommendation engine available in my Twitter network. This morning was no different. I jumped into Twitter to find a link to one of my media heros,...

My friend and colleague, Ken Udas, had asked me earlier in the Summer to contribute to his excellent Terra Incognita blog but I kept blowing deadlines and missing obligations. Ken gave me an extension and has been gracious to allow me to squeeze a guest post in between a few very smart people. I had a good time working up something that was very different than what usually shows up at his site and I hope he isn’t too put off by it. My post addresses the changes in big media and their evolving and emerging interest in embracing the social web. It looks at big media and their amazing move...

About two years ago I was hooked on the idea of building a social life stream application … I went so far as to email a few of the smart people I know, sharing diagrams, and video chatting with said smart people to see about building something. After I spent hours and hours drawing sketches and driving myself crazy I sort of gave up on the idea. My idea was to not only stream my stuff into one place, but to organize all my friends stuff based on the social network/online spaces they publish in. We’d all have accounts with our own stream in them, but could pull together everyone...

Just running through a lunchtime feed reading frenzy and came across a post by my friend and colleague, Bart Pursel. Bart and I have worked together in one capacity or another for the last half dozen years or so; first when he was an Instructional Designer in the IST Solutions Institute and now as a Fellow of sorts in ETS focusing on games for education. Bart spends about a week a month in our offices … sort of a part time residency for him. Today I read a post he wrote at his excellent Virtual Learning Worlds blog titled, Evolving Spaces. It is interesting to read his view on our ever-evolving...

With the release of Office 2008 for the Mac and (I think) 2007 on the PC Microsoft introduced the .docx file type. I have no problem with it, but I no longer use Office only Google Docs. The problem is that from what I can tell Google Docs will not import .docx files … when I get one via email I am out of luck. But a couple of links emerged today … the first is the utility that Microsoft itself provides to change the file types. Simple application that is downloadable from the Microsoft site. The second, and I haven’t tried this one yet, is a site called Zamzar. It looks...

I just wrote about what I think will be the tipping point for mobile devices on our campus over at Learning and Innovation … already a couple of interesting comments. We shall see how it all shakes down. This morning I came across a little something from SixApart, the people behind Movable Type — they make the blogging software we are using for the Blogs at Penn State. They’ve released a plugin that provides an iPhone/Touch specific template for authoring your blog. I still think once people on campus (a) get blogs, (b) realize all they can be used for, and (c) embrace these...