joanvinallcox's posterous - Roaming around the webscape!

Aug 3 / 8:37am

The Web is About Connections

Holiday Monday and I'm playing on the web. I'm scanning through my MakeUseOf.com subscription and decide to look at this - http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/technology-explained-how-the-internet-works/

I read this:

Look at a map of the Internet sometime and you’ll see that it is like a million superhighways with no lines painted on the road. It’s a snake pit of computers attaching to modems attaching to phone lines, or cable, or satellites, or cell networks, attaching to more computers, servers, routers and modems and so on, and so on. There is no beginning. There is no end.

It's the big picture, and it has a picture

In the image above, you are looking at one very small part of the Internet. See that star-burst like image it is extracted from? Go take a look at the full image.

I take the invitation and find this image

It's stunningly beautiful, in my opinion, and my mind makes another connection; it's the macro to a micro image metaphor:

Dandelion fluff, courtesy of Yahoo's image search,

(I used Yahoo's controlled image search to find a copyright clean image -filtering for Creative Commons images.)

A quick puff and the dandelion seeds spread out into the world, finding places to link to.

The web is made up of connections, and that's how our minds work to: the visualization of the web looks like a dandelion, and knowing the global nature of the dandelion, I can grok the global outreaching of web connections.

The web is made up of almost infinite connections, and when I land on one, my mind makes the connections that seed my use of the web's connections. I link on/with the web.

http://jnthweb.ca/
http://joanvinallcox.wordpress.com

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Filed under // communication_theory

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Jul 31 / 5:35pm

The Web is a Creativity Generator generating a Culture of Creativity

Photo by Tabea Dibou, from Flickr

We can see more people creating more works than ever before in history. And it's because of the web and because the web is social. On the web, much is possible. Whether you are finding the right beautiful photo (with the right Creative Commons license) to illustrate metaphorically the connectivity and the beauty of the internet for a blog post, or whether you are playing with a web app (Skitch - http://skitch.com/) to draw

or to explain something

The web is a space where people want to make, to create. I'm creating this blog post, because it's FUN! And easy. The phrase "user-friendly" developed with the personal computer. Web apps are aimed at being user-friendly to entice and encourage people to use them, to be creative.

The social aspect of the web, the possibility of being seen/heard/recognized, even if only by a very few others, encourages people's creativity. I might not have composed this blog post if the one I created yesterday hadn't been re-tweeted, and got a comment. That thrill of recognition is energizing. So people are playing on computers and posting their creativity on the web. As we get responses ourselves, and even if we just see others get responses, we are encouraged to join in the play. And playfulness spreads.

So serious people who sell cars and race cars become part of the crowd playing:

Two typographers ( Pierre & Damien / plmd.me ) and a pro race pilot (Stef van Campenhoudt) collaborated to design a font with a car.
The car movements were tracked using a custom software, designed by interactive artist Zachary Lieberman. ( openframeworks.cc )

Which I downloaded - nl.toyota.be/iqfont and played with.

Art, play, creativity - that's how we humans learn and that's what makes us happy and healthy. And the web is our creativity playground.

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Jul 30 / 2:49pm

Why I Use More than One Social Bookmarking Service

Not that I'm paranoid (or maybe I am but I like to call it cautious skepticism) but I am always aware than any of the free web services that I use, or even ones I've paid for, could go belly up and my stuff on it (them) could vanish into a black hole. So when I read about speculation that my wonderful collection of bookmarks on del.icio.us could disappear, I feel my paranoia is justified.

Internet search marketers could lose some invaluable free tools from Yahoo such as their Site Explorer. Marshall Kirkpatrick at ReadWriteWeb was concerned what the deal meant for Build Your Own Search Service (BOSS), Yahoo's search developer platform Search Monkey and social bookmarking service Delicious, which he described as "one of the last era's most heartbreaking symbols of untapped potential in social media".
Bing is exciting as an effective challenger to Google, but if that competition comes at the cost of cannibalising Yahoo's innovative search work – then we won't be so excited about Bing any more.

via guardian.co.uk

I also celebrate that I have a strategy to deal with this. What are the odds that two similar web services will disappear at the same time? Not good, I hope.

My web stuff paranoia has led me to set up another social bookmarking service called Diigo. So I have two active accounts on different social bookmarking services.

So does that mean I have to save everything I like twice? Well, sort of, but that's because I've recently taken to using Evernote, a broader and more visual saving application. But back to strictly social bookmarking. I only save once.

How? you ask. In Diigo, under my account name, I go into "Tools" where I can "Import Bookmarks", but more importantly, I can "Save Elsewhere". I have added my del.icio.us account here, and every time I save to Diigo, I also save, without any extra work, to del.icio.us.

So I'm prepared! If Yahoo and Microsoft let del.icio.us die, I still have all my bookmarks in Diigo. (Same thing if something happened to Diigo.) And I have Evernote too!

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Filed under // social_bookmarking

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Jul 29 / 5:59pm

The Web is a Bottomless Toy Chest

I like to play on the web, and my biggest problem is my "I-can't-catch-up" anxiety. There is always more to explore. And for free, either for the basic version or for a month. I can never try everything out. I can't catch up. Ever.

I make things even more intense by following people who suggest really interesting web toys. Like Jane Hart, with her Jane's E-Learning tip of the Day

If you teach or train, or just like to play on the web, you should check out her blog, and subscribe to it.

Another of my current people to follow 'cause they give really neat toys - whoops, I mean URLs - away, is Steve Rubel - http://www.steverubel.com/ - Twice he mentioned Posterous. The first time, I tried it but left it orphaned. The second time, months, maybe years, later, I found my original account and started playing, even sort-of lifestreaming, copying him. Great fun.

His constant exploration and evolution is inspiring. Check him out, and subscribe to him in Posterous, and maybe to me too;-> As they say on tv, "Time well wasted!"

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Filed under // web_apps

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Jul 26 / 6:34pm

Totems

Using the iPhone camera and the app - Autostitch

Joan Vinall-Cox, PhD,
Social Media Consultant
905-845-4620

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Filed under // AutoStitch iPhone_camera

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Jul 24 / 8:24pm

First Summer Walking with an iPhone

Best summer for flowers in years!

Click here to download:

First_Summer_Walking_with_an_i.zip (1160 KB)

Joan Vinall-Cox, PhD,
Social Media Consultant
905-845-4620

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Filed under // iPhone_camera

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Jul 24 / 8:18pm

CHART OF THE DAY: How People Share Content On The Web

But watch out, Facebook. As a means of sharing content, Twitter is already about half as popular with only about one-tenth as many users.

This matters because content-sharers are the human crawlers that power both Facebook and Twitter's real-time search engines--which could turn out to be the way both startups end up making big money.

Follow the Chart Of The Day on Twitter: www.twitter.com/chartoftheday