learnandteachonline.com

Dave's been refining his experimental Flickr 2 Twitter app.

The picture part is a new wrinkle in TwitterGrams, a way to send an audio tweet -- by uploading an MP3 file, or much more easily by phoning it in using a gateway enabled by BlogTalk Radio.
It would be nice if the picstream had a little player like Blogger's Blogger Play.

I did make a no-Flash player for the audio TwitterGrams. I'm not sure I'd know where to start with a slide player (but might think on it! ;-) )

While I'd still like to try a new open source model for compliance training sometime, I am going to table the idea of trying an online course in s_____ h_________ training for the present.

I find I'm put off by all the competition -- afraid of the magnitude of it, but also dismayed by the character of it. Google always provides clues to commercial oversaturation. When I blog about h_________ training the contextual ads for training and for l__ firms and even loans are eagerly and persistently present, can't seem to shake them quick enough, even with masked content. And when I research the topic in search, the results are SEO-gamed to within an inch of my propriety. Just too much noise of a type I'm not in the temper to battle or to be associated with just now.

It makes me think that online compliance training in general may be taking on a slimy pall as a consequence of the marketing practices of its purveyors, in the same way that the abundance of affiliate programs and splogs have sullied the rep of online universities.

A rotten shame. We gotta clean up this town.

I've been testing CamStudio, a free version of Camtasia (long story about a fork in the development), and re-tried Wink. I got spoiled with Captivate and can't accept the narrower range of features of the free programs and the quality of the output. I think Wink might be a little better, at least for my purposes, than CamStudio.

Later: Here's another free one I hadn't heard of, via James Corbett: Jing. Check out James's screencast on the soon-to-be-released Grazr 2.0, now with drag 'n' drop!

When Dave mentioned finding more ways for the backchannel to participate in conferences, it reminded me of an abandoned experiment to use Moodle, the open source LMS, to encourage conference discussions to continue after the fact. It would be for both virtual attendees and people who were there, but want to continue on with an important topic or two after the conference has ended.

I may get back to the project, because:

1) I'm kind of a hermit myself and would like a way to get more involved in conferences I don't want to show up for or can't afford to attend.

2) It seems to me if you're attending a conference virtually, there isn't a huge need to participate in real time (though I do see the draw of the togetherness aspect, and the new cheap or free video streaming makes the real time participation more feasible than it's ever been). Attending later is a little like the timeshifting media.

3) Most important, in our online ADD-world, some key ideas tend to be forgotten too quickly. There's so much info to take in that you tend to move on to the next thing the next day or next hour. I'd like to see conference-goers choose one or more topics they think are worthy of exploring in more depth, then take them online.

It's a kind of a hybrid of conferences and online learning. I suppose for some industry-oriented conferences you could even make them formal enough to qualify for continuing ed credits. Why not?

I was so happy to see all the developers popping up with ideas in answer to Dave Winer's advice request for the best way to go about porting the OPML Editor to Linux. Great idea to approach it that way, and get a fresh crop of techies thinking about it. The open-source Frontier crowd doesn't seem to be doing much at all anymore.

God knows I don't work at that level, and barely even understand what's needed or what the aim is, but I know I'd love to see the Linux build so the OPML Editor Community Server can run on it. That makes all kinds of sense.

But who knows, maybe Dave is thinking more along the lines of fractional horsepower servers. That's cool, too, and even more groundbreaking.

Hell yeah, I'd put a teensy web server in my little Sansa mp3 player to sync podcasts with my home network. Put one in my cat's collar or on the bottom of my shampoo bottle. Or, how about this? In a bookmark in my paper book that tells me where I left off so I can continue in audio when I get in the car?

A discussion of Facebook and Moodle integration is going on in the Moodle forums. The thread. Registration is required, but painless. Then I think you have to join the "Moodle Lounge" course to read or post on the board.

I'll read it more carefully later and may have something to say.

I'm setting up a laptop, trying to use as much free stuff as possible.

One pleasant surprise was the drawing program isn't half bad. It even takes a .psd Photoshop native file.

See how it goes.

I got all worked up the last couple of days after Dave posted a link to a 3 bubbles demo. It's an Ajax chatroom you embed in your blog.

Anyone who's been around on the internet longer than 5 or 6 years knows it's nothing new, yet it's crept into the rarified realm of the "fundable."

It annoyed me so much I spent an hour or so seeking out an open source Ajax PHP chat and putting it on my OPML blog.

Dave said this about it this morning, adding an angle on the announcement I hadn't considered.

The chat was easy to set up. I've configured PHP/MySQL chat apps before. No wait, I even put Perl/CGI chats on sites as far back as 1997. It's like the new wave of internet business types don't know that features or applications exist unless they are commonly used on blogs.

I actually do have an idea for monetizing chat that has a really original model. I used to manage the AT&T Worldnet chat rooms (through a bubble consulting firm), and suggested it to them. The community team liked the idea, but it's so hard to get big companies to move on anything, especially if it never has been done.

The term of my non-compete must be long passed by now. I'd tell a funding source about it except I'd probably have to write a business plan to get a hearing and puff the concept all up so it sounds big enough to need a staff and R&D costs and all that crappola. You can't get money for a really good small idea.

(Have I mentioned I'm bubbleshy? Yes. Here and there.)

Drupal user-to-user help is great. Lots of users means lots of the same questions and answers. Since I've been using the tool in November, every question I've wanted answered has been available in the support forum archives.

F'rinstance, tonight I needed to change the year field for archive dates. I didn't need help with the code so much as I just didn't know where to find the file I needed to change, you know how that goes?

From the moment I typed in drupal.org until I found my answer was -- seriously -- about 45 seconds. Can't beat it.

I don't beat myself up anymore for not keeping up with everything happening on the internet. You just can't.

AJAX is something I don't know about, don't quite get, but it's creeping up on my not-written-down brain nag list.

This badge thing seems kind of cool. Rod Boothby describes them as "a way for non-technical users to drop AJAX-powered interactive tools into their blogs and wiki posts."