Podcasting ala PodBean

A podcast is a series of audio and/or video files (in digital format, ie not analog) which are released episodically. Podcasts differ from other forms of sharing media from the internet (ie downloading or streaming webcasting). The distributor maintains a list of their available files as a web feed on their server. The person receiving the podcast uses specific client application software termed podcatcher. This will access the web feed, locate any updates and automatically download new files in the series. Automatic downloading of new files can be set up. While there are several file formats that can be used, MP3(audio) and MP4 (video) seem like standards for creating podcast media.

Podcast Alley (http://www.podcastalley.com/) provides Podcast Aggregator which can be downloaded, allowing you to access their vast library of podcasts. Or one can peruse Podcast.com (http://podcast.com/) or the intelligent wonders of NPR (http://www.npr.org/rss/podcast/podcast_directory.php).

If I want to create my own podcasts I need a host. I located a free site called PodBean (http://www.podbean.com/).

PodBean Publishing Features:

• Easy to use - Even without programming knowledge one can create professional looking podcasts pretty quickly. Users are guided through the steps to upload, publish, manage and promote podcasts.

• Unmetered Bandwidth and Monthly Storage Increases – If your podcast becomes popular you will need more bandwidth. Podbean doesn’t charge extra for your needed bandwidth so you aren’t charged extra when your podcast goes viral. While there may be charges for increased storage, one can get started without unexpected charges.

• Design Themes Can Be Customized – Just like Bloggr, there are an assortment of starting designs. These can be customized by following step by step instructions. All designs come with widgets for Web 2.0 uses.

• Integrated Feed Generation – Creating feeds is simplified with their publishing tools which include a “full-featured and automatic feed generation (RSS2, iTunes and ATOM) plus intuitive feed editing, iTunes configuration and preview.”

• Analysis Tools – One can track the success of their podcasts with analysis tools. The statistics system provides data regarding visitors, subscribers, hits and geographical distribution.

• Income Options – If you decide to go pro the options include advertisement, paid subscription and merchandise sales. Subscription includes eCommerce tools for secure payments.

• Integrate With Other Formats – This provider allows podcasts to be integrated into existing websites, blogs, etc. Podcasts can be embedded in various media including emails, blogs, websites and social network sites.

• Mobile Access – Podcasts can be accessed via iPhone etc.

It's very tempting to turn my explorations in Web 2.0 into podcasts featuring the Techo-Gnome, my inept technology challenged alter-ego.

Photo and Media Sharing

Flickr is clearly a happening place. While I was looking around for a privacy policy I was informed that there had been 5,625 uploads in the last minute, 71,248 things tagged with jump and 2.5 million things geotagged this month. I was going to upload a photo of mine to see if it was part of the pool but the math is too big. Yes, the last minute is a link and you get pages of peoples pics, including a dirt road in Japan with a tag in Japanese.

I created the slide show for my blog in Flickr and here’s the link: http://www.flickr.com/photos/sumnertime/4295559503/www.shutterfly.com/

Features on Flickr include:
Upload - Upload from your desktop, send by email, or use your cameraphone.
Edit - Get rid of red eye, crop a photo, or get creative with fonts and effects.
Organize - Use collections, sets, and tags to organize your photos and videos. The Organizr is where both Collections and Sets are created. It also allows you to perform common tasks on large batches of photos and videos, such as tagging, changing permissions, or editing timestamps.
Sharing and privacy - Use groups and privacy controls to share your photos and videos. Groups can either be public, public (invite only), or completely private. Every group has a pool for sharing photos and videos and a discussion board for talking.
Maps - Share where your photos and videos were taken, and see photos and videos taken near you. So if is raining during your vacation you can pick up some pics from the same area from a vacationer who was luckier. Using the map is easy, you just drag-and-drop your photos and videos onto a map (using the Organizr.)
Make Stuff - Use your favorite Flickr images to create stuff on Snapfish. Cards, photo books, framed prints, DVDs, etc.
Keep in Touch - Get updates from family and friends. I got to see my granddaughter ice skate for the first time within hours of her leaving the ice.

Picassa seems to be smaller than Flickr, but at least they keep all the vowels. There seem to be some problems with people losing their images on Picassa but there’s no way to know if they just lost their account info. Here’s my account and a nice image of the sunrise from the surface of mars.
http://picasaweb.google.com/home

Features:
Album Privacy - As the album owner, you decide exactly who has access to your album. In addition to the different levels of album visibility, Picasa Web Albums lets you keep track of the users you've shared an album with. Adding people to the "Shared with" list has the following benefits:
• Privacy. The people on this list are the only ones that can see albums set to the "Sign-in required to view" access level.
• Email notification. Everyone you invite using the Share button is added to the list and will receive an email invitation to view your photos. They also get notified when new photos are uploaded to the album in the future.
• Collaboration. You can choose to let people on the list add photos to your album.
Sharing - Use the Share button in Picasa or Picasa Web Albums to add people to the "Shared with" list and to send them an email invitation to view the album. Follow these steps

Add name tags -- Picasa scans all the photos in your collection, identifies the ones with faces, and groups photos with similar faces together. It's easy to add name tags to dozens of photos at once by clicking "Add a name" below a photo and typing the person's name. Once you've tagged some pictures, you can easily find all your pictures with the same two people in them.
Collaborative albums -- You can upload to a friend's album directly from the Picasa software.

Geotag your photos with Google Maps – You can add geotags using Google Maps. Click the Places button and drag your photos to the location where you took them. You can still use Google Earth to tag or view photos if you prefer.

Import, upload, and share, - The import process has been streamlined so that you can star your favorites, upload to Picasa Web Albums, and share with Google contact groups at the same time.

I decided against joining photobucket.com/ and www.photoshare.org/. As a long distance Grammy it's all about sharing and I just don't know anyone who's using these. I haven't seen anything they offer that would surpass what I've got with Flickr and Picasa.

Using a Blog for Art Instruction and Student Gallery

Using a Blog for Art Instruction and Student Gallery
Final Project Proposal
OLIT 593 Spring 2010
Submitted by Sumner Walz

Topic
Creating a space for students to be able to maintain a gallery of art work and critical commentary that coincides with the curriculum of an introduction to art course. This 100 level art course includes study of basic elements of art and a survey of art history. The gallery space should be viewable by all members of a course or group following this curriculum.

My interest in this topic
I currently teach an online course on Introduction to Art; the student population is composed of primarily rural New Mexico adult students. Through the process of revising specific aspects of the curriculum, I have found that these particular students respond extremely well to activities that involve web-based discovery learning of artists, works of art, and museums, galleries, etc.

I currently make use of tools within the LMS used at this particular institution (WebCT) for the students to maintain a gallery of their research and to demonstrate skills in critiquing art, however the tool I have been using is limiting and not intuitive. It doesn’t allow students to link to images on the Web, so they have to download images and upload into the tool, which is often a struggle and problematic. There is no mechanism for peer review and commenting directly within the gallery space. The gallery space is removed from rest of the components of the lessons, which can make students crazy. Once the course is over, the students no longer have access to their creative work.

Using a Web 2.0 tool, in particular the blog format, would be a more creative and lasting environment for this type of student work and would foster learning skills that would extend beyond the limit of the course. Through the process of creating their own blog space, students could respond to lesson activities by linking instead of copying images and would allow them to extend their work to include videos, animated and interactive art elements. And I will enjoy being able to expand the lessons to include peer review and collaborative work through commenting. Within this format, I will also be able to incorporate other components of the lessons within the same space as the gallery work, which will be a more cohesive and structured experience for the students.

Outline
I. Instructional blog pages
...A. Header with graphical tie to the course
...B. Links to tutorials and help pages in support of the required work
...C. Links to sources of artworks, art databases, virtual museums, etc.
...D. Main posting area reserved for the current lesson activity
.......1. Instructor-posted image(s) and questions for critique
.......2. Student comments in response to critique questions
.......3. Instructions for student gallery work for the lesson
...E. Links to prior lesson activities
...F. Blog roll of the student pages
II. Student blog pages
...A. Main posting area for response to lesson assignment and comments by peers
...B. Links to prior lesson work
...C. Links to art and art sites of personal interest

I know the outline did not translate well.

Obstrufication

The word for the day...Obstrufication

I've been using this word for about 40 years now. Not only is it useful, I can't come up with an adequate synonym (Cinnamon, if you ask my partner) which succinctly expresses the identical concept. Obstrufication means to make unnecessarily dense or complex, presumably to prevent others from comprehending it. I wanted to double check my spelling of it (which is really all about the "u") and discovered that while it generates 788 hits on google, it doesn't appear in any dictionary. Not even the Oxford Unabridged, the mother-lode of words.

We all (and by we I mean me and 788 others) all agree on the meaning of obstrufication. I learned this word in college, and now, decades later discover that it does not exist. What makes a word a word? Obfuscation, it turns out, is the word we've all been really meaning to use. (And by we I mean me and 788 others)

Just to make the time lost looking in online dictionaries and envisioning making my own Wikipedia page for those confused by obstrufication, allow me to share something useful I did find. Here's the top defining words of the 00's, which I refer to as the oh-ohs. http://www.merriam-webster.com/top-ten-lists/defining-a-decade/rogue.html

I think we've all learned something here today. Just cuz you learn it in college, pay off all those student loans, lead a productive life and use the word often doesn't make it real. You generally don't know what you don't know.

Now that's unnecessarily dense.

DeviantArt. You can look but don't chat...

DeviantArt has rules.

While searching for a social networking site I thought it would be interesting to find a space specifically for artists. (See the social networking site for artists I chose in an earlier post.) During my research a google search turned up a number of options including DeviantArt. The site looked great. It abounds with interesting art and there’s clearly socializing.

As of last fall this Los Angeles based site had over 11 million members and receives over 100 million submissions per day. I was surprised to see a related article in a subsequent search. DevientArt wants the world to know that they are not a social networking site. They’re annoyed that people are using it for that and would like all non artists to go away. More importantly, they would like the non artists to take their blurry photos and provocative poses elsewhere.

As an artist I could join. But the assignment is to check out social networking sites. So if you’re headed to DevientArt I can save you a trip. Enjoy the art but don’t annoy anyone.

In 2004, Mark Zuckerberg Broke Into A Facebook User's Private Email Account

This is the convoluted story of brainiacs acting badly.
It focuses on Mark Zuckerberg the founder and CEO of Facebook, a site 400 million people visit each month.

This story really occurs back in May 2004 when Mark was a 19-year-old sophomore at Harvard. In an earlier post I detailed the evolution of the physical Facebook, long-term paper-and-ink networking handbook for students and faculty at Harvard. Mark collaborated with three other students in transforming this into an on line networking site for the same student body.

His co-collaborators accused him of stealing their ideas and wanted the Harvard newspaper to write an article on this. He successfully persuaded the editor that there was not a clear case of disputed ownership. The three disgruntled accusers responded by digging up another person to complain. The paper decided to reopen the investigation and ultimately to publish the story. Since you can print just about anything you want in America without regard to facts or reputations, the article doesn’t reach the point of criminal offense until Mark, assumedly angry and nervous, crosses the line.

According to the story, Mark uses log in data from the on line Facebook to hack into the email accounts of the reporters and to read their emails. If he did this today he would have violated Facebook’s privacy policy. But there was no privacy policy back then. In an ironic twist, perhaps his experience with disgruntled and litigious ex-friends inspired the sort of privacy policies which allowed Facebook to become so popular. Do any of the current Facebook junkies know the privacy policy? I would guess they checked the required box without a glance at the fine print. But this is just an hypothetical continuation of my “kids these days snarkiness” that keeps winding it’s way into my posts. I’m working on it.

Why is this a news story today? Can anyone hold a grudge this long? Maybe breaking up the team was motivated by the behavior issues of the complainer/litigants. I don't know...I'm just saying... Maybe he stole their ideas. Maybe they are jealous. Maybe the sports editor of the Harvard newspaper was the wrong person to make the call.

Road to the Roses

It's that time of year again. Hundreds of three year old horses are vying to get in the stampede known as the Kentucky Derby. If you go to this site http://www.roadtotheroses.com/ you can have your own stable. First prize is a trip for two to the derby. Another prize is a $1000 bet for the horse of your choice. There's lots of other prizes but it's really about the ponies. You watch them run several times on the way to the derby and, well, you can't help but get attached. That's a bad thing for a serious gambler. But it's really fun to develop favorites and watch their progress. On the other hand, if you're more of a gambler you can get in on the future pool and bet the fast horses at better odds. http://www.kentuckyderby.com/contenders/future-wager.

Will Social Network for Art

Against all odds I'm part of the social networking world. I thought I should find a site where I could combine the varied parts of me... painter, sculptor, etc. Would you believe that the sculpture site doesn't mention painting and visa versa? So I've landed on the oil painting site. Here's my address http://www.art-networks.net/account/


What applications or web sites I examined:
I considered Facebook because my daughter-in-law has an account there and posts photos of the kids. I decided against it because I think Facebook's policy of owning everything you post, even after you leave, will drive off any artist who can read.
I checked out DeviantArt, which I located in a google search for social networking sites for artists. I was drawn (artistic pun not intended) to the large assortment of artists and styles. The site is oriented toward showing and promoting art. However, in a separate search I located the information that DeviantArt is not intended to be a social networking site and that they are mystified as to why people have started using it as such. They clearly view social net-workers as a plague that needs to be eradicated.

Which one I chose and why:
I ended up joining Art-Networks because it meets all the requirements of the assignment and my own goals as an artist. I will be able to upload images of my art in pdf files. Visitors will be able to view my art without needing to register or spend any money. I can create descriptions and other information in Word documents which easily upload. Because this is a site by and for artists, and because a certain amount of paranoia comes with the artistic territory, Art-Networks is more security conscious than Facebook or other sites which claim ownership to anything you post.

How easy or difficult it was to create an account and get started using the application:
Joining was easy. I suspect many artists would not survive a more difficult process. Art Network contains a directory, groups, gallery space, videos, forums, blogs, events and a shop. Forming a profile is easy. The site is designed for uploading images. I've noticed a lot of videos being used but I haven't mastered that feature yet.

I don’t have contacts within the site so I haven’t experienced that feature. The tools for composing messages and adding contacts look straight forward.
One of their revenue generating materials is a dating service called Chatter. One encounters it when entering popular pages like the gallery.

The gallery is set up well. It presents over 1000 images and each one can link you to the full site for that artist.

A rating of the application and its usefulness:
If you're and artist and want to combine a gallery space for your art with social networking I think this site deserves an A. It makes it easy to share recent creations with family and friends who are far away. I'm disappointed in their exclusion of sculpture but, since I could not find a site open to both, this is as good as it gets.

List of Facts:
Documents and Media that can be uploaded
Web pages: no
PDF files: no
Images (jpg, gif, png): all formats
Audio/video: yes
Other: images can be tagged
Special Features:
Tool for sending invitations
Tool for creating polls on your profile page
Event calendar that members can contribute to
Tag Cloud (site’s hot tags)
Blog with list of top bloggers
Directory that members can add to with a listing of recent entries
Access & Viewer participation
Method of access: create a username and password
Are there levels of access (viewing/editing): no – if two people were to overwrite a profile simultaneously, one persons updates would be lost
Can there be simultaneous editing: profiles are private so doesn’t apply
Is there RSS feed: yes
Private group access: yes
Other: viewers can make comments on entries
Customization
Only your own profile can be customized
Support
Is there technical support and what is the cost: free response to email questions
How and when can the technical support be accessed: form email
Are there tutorials online or downloadable: no
Are there searchable help pages: the help text is on one web page, searchable, categorized by subject and FAQ
Is there a user forum: yes
Password support: only by resetting your own
Technical Requirements:
Does it work with all browsers: yes
Does it work with all operating systems and platforms: no information provided; works on PC or Mac


I'll put up some of my art. OK, I paint nudes. But I'm playing with some abstracts and I'll add a couple landscapes. And I'll sneak in a metal sculpture. If you can't bend the rules on an art site, where?

Knee deep in Delicious

Using Delicious:
I have been using delicious to organize a few projects I have going. While tagging is easy subscribing to others tags may be an entirely different kettle of fish. I can only imagine a tsunami of information and the valid question of how long will it take to wade through it all. So far I have 508,217 bookmarks that appeared as a result of one subscription.

The first project is a college level module on renewable energy for a 100 level environmental science class. There is a whole lotta old news on this topic. But a decade ago when I was living entirely off grid and using solar for electricity and water. I knew people who knew people. There was this guy (name long forgotten) who had products under development in Japan. In case you're not aware of their problems, air quality is extremely bad in highly populated areas. They are funneling significant resources in the direction of clean energy. Since they live over one of the most active fault-lines on the globe, one would hope that rules out nuclear reactors. As of then they were working on a window film like the ones that keep your carpets from fading. But this film was really a solar panel and all the windows of a home produced electricity which was stored in batteries. It was in development then but it might be a reality now. But how to tag for innovation and avoid the stack of yesterdays news?

The second project is creating a lesson for lesson plans for student study habits in grades K-5. I foresee another wave.

My account is http://delicious.com/sumner_walz.

How does it work? Easily, so far. Subscription is quick. Instructions are brief and clear. The help page could have a few more options but it does get one started. The installation didn't make my Firefox crash and that's always a consideration. Tagging couldn't be easier.

Tags are made by people like me and their personal idea of what organizing principles are useful. By being personal they seem to guide my research and are more intuitive. I'm aware of the term folksonomy but don't work it into full sentences yet.

Advantage for delicious, tag bundles, a tool that allows the formation of a hierarchy by tagging tags. (You can export/download your bookmarks but tag bundles are not portable) And tag clouds, a visual display of the popularity of tags, suggesting popular choices that might work for me.

Disadvantages include the fact that since tags aren't standard I could get many items that are not what I was looking for. I'm interested in alternative energy. I don't know how to avoid recipes for someone's energy drink.

I haven't solved the problem with the tsunami of information generated from subscribing to others tags. This is a handy feature I want to use but getting the right info is tricky.

If you are using Firefox, Delicious sort of takes over your desktop. It also has an intrusive pop-up if you choose to use the old computer bookmarks option. The huge sidebar can be easily removed but it would be more convenient if it was smaller. It's convenient to have but just too damn big.

In an article on Social Bookmarking by Hamond et al (2005), he describes the phenomenon of "Tag Soup". Traditional means for organizing information were specific, universal and hierarchical. The free tagging approach can end up with a jumbled mish mash of information. Order appearing from the users tags is possible. Confusion is a certainty. He says.

It's undeniably true that my old bookmarks tool is a confusing disorganized mess. It shouldn't be difficult for delicious to be a much improved mouse trap to help me find what I'm looking for. I'm still nervous about those half a million sites about alternative energy. Effective subscribing may require a little more finesse.