The Village Green

One of my favorite comics is Rhymes With Orange. Back in August the strip featured a very funny look back at the early genesis of blogging… and cave art!

http://www.rhymeswithorange.com/home.php?date=20070822

Serendipitously found an interesting tool this morning that displays a variety of mind mapping techniques into a periodic table. The table has a visual example when you hover your cursor over each of the ‘elements.’

http://www.visual-literacy.org/periodic_table/periodic_table.html

I didn’t get this at first, but it turns out you can’t trust anything just because it is in print. Not even the advertising. No matter how often I learn something, I have to relearn it in a new context.

Seems someone was inspired by a Google AdWord and created one of their own that was intended as satire. Okay, I don’t think of advertising outside of the Superbowl as deserving much attention, but the target of the satire, in this case, Apple Inc., didn’t think it was funny.

Once again, the unintended consequences are often the more significant. A sample from the author:

2,781 impressions and 354 clicks later, my ad had cost me a total of $17.55, and had a click through ratio of 12.72 percent.

I guess it didn’t go as unnoticed as I had planned.

2,781 views isn?t much for a campaign on Google, but unfortunately, one of those 2,781 views forwarded the story to one of the bigger blogs, and things kind of spiraled out of control from there.

The whole sordid story is linked below.

http://www.didntyouhear.com/2007/09/07/dyh-isnt-funny

Stephen Downes has a nice collection of video training sessions listed with Google Video. One in particular seemed very helpful in understanding what it means to adopt a transparent life online entitled “Web 2.0 and Your Own Learning Development.” I’m experimenting with embedding the video below.  The link will take you to his collection of other videos on Google Video.

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-5431152345344515009&hl=en

One of my favorite web tools disappeared many months ago. Recently, Cloudalicious has made a comeback, and is now better than ever. Initially, Cloudalicious would generate a tag cloud from a site, which was pretty cool. For example, here is the tag cloud for this site:
http://cloudalicio.us/tagcloud.php?url=http://villagegreen.edublogs.org/
Now, it not only generates a tag cloud, it also lists who has saved the link to a site with del.icio.us. Here is the list for this site, as seen from del.icio.us:
http://del.icio.us/url/d12abeea16690ee438c42a20e0829a5d?all

The semantic web has many threads, and cloudalicious helps reveal some of them.

http://cloudalicio.us/index.php