Sky’s Blog

Howard Rheingold has a series of videos describing how journalists (particularly) can use online tools to create their own radars (seek out information), filters (remove the crap), and dashboards (display the information). You can see lots of other video on his video blog.

I have thought recently about writing an online book (downloadable) or even a printable book about the “plumbing” that allows bloggers to integrate lots of sources into their blogs—because most bloggers are not really technologists and it’s hard to make some of these software tools work correctly. My thought was to connect the dots and come up with a Give your blog a shot of steroids “book” that would be really useful to non-tech-savvy bloggers. When am I going to do that?

Howard’s major message right now is about 21st Century Literacies which you can view online—he and I were in London during July 2009, where he delivered that particular talk.

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See my post from yesterday on the art of Rich Holoch, KY6R.

See his photos directly on Flickr for even more.

Here is the second of his photo sets that I promised I’d feature:

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Some weird and wonderful physical-art photos from KY6R. Rich Holoch has been by profession a database administrator (DBA), now an amazing physical-and-photographic artist, and for a long time an amateur radio operator (thus the “KY6R”). At one time I suffered the amateur radio thing myself, and although still licensed, I am far less an afficionado than Rich is. His interest is DX meaning distance and low power [QRP] amateur radio operation. A couple of watts of power and contacting someone on the other side of the globe. (Or maybe bouncing a radio signal off the moon and listening for an echo.)

I particularly like Rich’s approach of using found objects, which trigger nostalgia, and positioning and lighting them creatively. Some might describe his work as spooky or weird as well as completely intriguing.

I’m going to feature two sets of KY6R photos, one set today and one set tomorrow – here is the first:

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John Francis is a really motivated learner and educator. He walked the world for 17 years silently. Yes, without speaking. And today he is most definitely talking about it. What he says contains a lot of messages—there’s certainly one in there for you. [I heard him speak at the Digital Earth Symposium, held at the University of California, Berkeley, in 2007.]

In 1971 he witnessed two tankers colliding, creating an oil spill in San Francisco Bay, and decided to give up riding in motorized vehicles. He began walking everywhere he went. “I thought that if I started walking, everyone would follow.” So on his 27th birthday, he decided he would stop speaking for just one day “to give it a rest.” “I have to tell you it was a very moving experience…for the very first time I began listening.” He realized that (as a regular speaking human) he listened to only the first few words or sentences when someone was talking, and then “my mind would race ahead” thinking about what “I was going to say in response.” He decided to do this for another day, and another day, and this stretched to a year, and then lasted 17 years. [Continue reading and you can also view the TED talk given by John Francis in 2008...] (continue reading…)

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