Nope not me, I am still at full time work at Open Education Global and the real work of blogging here But I did get this interesting email from BCPensions:

We’ve received notice from your former employer that your employment ended on December 17, 2021.

As a vested College Pension Plan member, whose age at termination of employment was over the earliest retirement age, you’re entitled to a monthly pension benefit and are eligible to apply for your pension immediately. This letter outlines your options and explains how to apply for your pension.

Indeed, in 2020 and 2021 I had contracts to do web development for a few projects with the Justice Institute of British Columbia (mostly likely I have Tannis Morgan to thank for the referral. And the JIBC system had my hired as a Sessional Employee (working remotely from 2 provinces to the east), but it also meant for that time period I was paying into the BCPension fund.

And now just being around for a bit longer means that even though I am still working, I can start tapping into that fortune starting next month. Look at me on the retirement gravy train (after taxes, the monthly amount might be enough to buy 3/4 of a tank of gas, but its something).

But it was a fun reminder of the work I got to do then, back in my gravy days of WordPress development (have I used that expression twice in a post? obvious I ain’t writing with Claude), and it was good stuff. The funny thing is that this 6 year old project web site is still online fully functional.

BC Corrections Leadership

The first project was a resource for leadership in the BC Corrections system (good proof I can work in content I know nothing about). As we called it in oiur team “CorrLeader” was a mix of accumulated resources and also a guide to programs and offerings from the organization and JIBC.

Peter, the project leader had much of the concepty organized but what I liked working with him was his interest in the metaphors and the visuals. So we developed this idea of leadership being a complex terrain, and sometimes we traveled it as specified by a map and other times exploring by a compass.

There were a few prototypes with generated maps and toying with Leaflet.Js but in ended up being rolled into WordPress with an elegant theme. One of my proudest parts was, after hearing how busy these leaders are, they don’t have time to look at a computer all day, that often they were on mobile. I dug into the WordPress API and did a lot of monkeying with JQuery and local storage to create a mobile side site that could display the latest resource, and allow the person using it to use and save filters for content they were interested in.

It’s even more remarkable that the Navigator site ( just HTML/CSS/JS) is also still online and working https://host.jibc.ca/ccjd/corrleadernav/

Towards the end, we even added a podcast called CorrTalk that was done all by the project leads, Sarah and Peter (who was a natural at being a host).

I’m still not sure of how/why ther web site is still there and functioning. Do they still use it? (nobody updates). Is it one of those projects that organizations forget about and thus it lives longer?

Segregation Reform Program

The second project is one I am a bit rusty on, it was again a whole series of standalone course-like materials about models of Corrections that move away and beyond punishment. The specifications were that it would be built in Articulate Rise (A tool I never used before but learned as I went) that was in some ways a bit interesting to use as it was in someways very flexible but also very limited, no hacking on functionality like WordPress.

The course content was embedded into a Blackboard course, and I believe then the module end quizzes were scored there. There were modules in Introduction to Segregation Reform, Administrative Fairness, Indigenous Cultural Awareness, Trauma-Informed Practice, Mental Health Needs in Custody Settings (I know these from a hardrive folder of content folders). JIBC provided me access to a vast collection of photos from Corrections facilities I could use, I just had to blur any faces of inmates.

The one post about the project I could fine was all about playing with custom CSS to do better bullet points (?)

Again i was surprised/shocked to find in my notes that the login I used at the time still works! I was able last night to peek at the old content I built.

And So?

I got this far without a real destination for this post. It still strikes me odd that much of this web/digital content still lives. I wonder if there is a term for bits of the web that still live because most people who would normally nuke a web site just forgot about them. Like survival by neglect?

But mostly I remember these projects as part of the long arc I had in working with colleagues who loved teasing out ideas, not afraid to try new things, and also gave me a lot of leeway in choosing visual and functional design.

Yeah, I think that is what I retired from… the fun/exciting work all in a time of optimism or belief in the potential of digital tools interwoven with human creativity.

Now it’s just Ask Claude blah blah blah blah borg. Not me, as I am not retired from work or creativity.

Featured Image: Retired flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0)

(now I am curious how the AgenticAI blog spammers will author comments all about the virtue of sand castles, but that’s another story).

Along with my recent efforts of sweeping a fleet of 12+ domains and web sites, archiving to my bone pile, and letting the registrations go, two larger ones loomed… util this month, when registrations and hosting for https://muraludg.org and https://theagoraonline.net come up for renewal.

I’m ready to let the waves of time reclaim them.

These were both significant projects I was part of 2015-2018, where I was not only building sites but also planning and implementing these projects. They were both things I am immensely grateful an almost accidental series of events –being on my fellowship at TRU, doing the wacky YouShow with Brian Lamb when we had a guest Tannis Morgan visiting, and she willing to play the part of “the consultant from Vancouver”.

Stop all the back narration! Through this, I got to be part of the UDG Agora project (archive link now) that Tannis managed with the Justice Institute of BC in collaboration with University of Guadalajara. Easily, this was THE Best project, team, participants, experience of my career. Okay, read the whole post for more

After two years of that project, the band was called together to organize a special institute on openness for UDG faculty, what we pulled off in 2018 as the UDG Moral of Open. It was a few years later, in 2021 Tannis contacted me to say that the domains and web sites that JIBC had registered and hosted were going to be let go. I asked or she offered, and I had it all transferred to me, and I have been keeping this going for the last 6+ years on my own time.

Why?

These were such key works and I also despise the clear cutting of web sites that companies and organizations do, it goes to my assertion that digital durability rides more on the individual than the institution.

But as I get older and cranky (just kidding), I start to wonder if anyone but me really cares about these sites. I can’t say one person has contacted me about them in 5+ years. All the links to the project from JIBC are gone. The web forgets only when people do.

So on June 1, when the renewal notice came in, I decided it was time to pack them up as an archive, and move my own domain.

Both of these are WordPress multisites, so archiving had a few bits to sort out. But my usual route of reaching for the OSX Site Sucker app (a $7 app made by a guy named Tick) paid off. It makes a static HTML version of sites, so I am not longer having to run, update, manage WordPress. I just let it loose to travel every link from the top, and for the most part, it “sucked up” into a directory on my Macbookpro.

That works for things linked from the main site, but as I often do, I sometimes toss other sites into the heap. So running through the other sites in the multisite admin helped find a few more from theagoraonline site and for muraludge I had to nab a tack on site I had did as an experiment. To note:

• theagoraonline.net All of the UDG agora actuall sat in a subdomain, there might have been the idea we might replicate the project in the future.
  • Landing Page: Set up to be a holder at the top of the domain, archived at https://bones.cogdogblog.com/agora/holder/
  • New landing page: Just made this quickly with an HTML5up template to guide the agora stuff https://bones.cogdogblog.com/agora/
  • All of UDG Agora: https://bones.cogdogblog.com/agora/udg/ includes a fleet
    • The Challenge Bank (SPLOT version of DS106 assignment bank) https://bones.cogdogblog.com/agora/udg/bank/
    • The Daily Try (SPLOT version of DS106 Daily Create) https://bones.cogdogblog.com/agora/udg/daily/
    • Dilo – this was a problem, it was a discourse community at https://dilo.theagoraonline.net that was never archived nor is ther much in the internet archive. I ended up making an archive page https://bones.cogdogblog.com/agora/udg/dilo/ but need to fix a bunch of internal links. One day
    • Comparte – Rather proud of this version of the TRU Writer SPLOT I managed to manually translate into Spanish. All participants used it to write final reports as short papers https://bones.cogdogblog.com/agora/udg/comparte/
      
      Lesser used but still preserved:
      
    • Ask us Anything – I had found a WordPress theme to set up a site that kind of worked like a mini Twitter for participants to ask questions https://bones.cogdogblog.com/agora/udg/ask/
    • Welcome to the Agora – presentation made with the SPLOTpoint theme for the Open Education 2015 conference in Vancouver https://bones.cogdogblog.com/agora/udg/opened15/
    • ImagePool – a TRU Collector SPLOT we made… I think to have a place for workshop participants share and embed images from they needed to enter for the Challenge Banl responses. https://bones.cogdogblog.com/agora/udg/imagepool/
    • Edupunk, EduBauhaus, D.I.O? – Hah, a presentation (SPLOTpoint again) I copresented with Brian and Tannis for a conference in Guadalojara– they actually requested us to talk about EDUPUNK. This was crowned by maybe my favorite edited video ever, the Edupunk Mockumentary Enjoy it all https://bones.cogdogblog.com/agora/udg/ciinovapp
    • Constellations Work Training Services – I forgot totally about this, a visualization experiment Tannis contracted me to do for this idea of displaying sets of work skills as constellations that could be navigated 3D wise using I think DJ3s. Actually this was hung on the muraludg site, but for some reason I slid it over to https://bones.cogdogblog.com/agora/constellation/
    • muraludg.org – SiteSucker got everything, this site was maybe a little less sprawling? Lots of things copied form the agoraonline, SPLOTs and all
      • Contestar – a version of the “Ask Me Anything” enjoy the archived error messages https://bones.cogdogblog.com/muraludg/contestar/
      • Acumulador – Maybe the top use I have been part of for TRU Collector. We had working sessions in groups, and they all had generate a report by uploading an image of their sketch notes and provide information. https://bones.cogdogblog.com/muraludg/acumulador/
      • Daily Opener – another iteration of the Daily Create. Rather impressive how much participation was in both of these by our colleagues in Mexico, many of whom seem to have never wiped out their accounts (judging by embeds that still work) https://bones.cogdogblog.com/muraludg/daily/

I thought I set up web redirects on the original domains, but looks like my chops are dusty. Regardless, they all go into the big web surf end of June and likely some cryptopokermassage scam site will grab the domain.

No regrets here and it was fun to do a little late night archiving. Sitesucker is THE Bomb, it does such a brilliant job of doing the WordPress to static HTML work, no need for me to be entangled with Claude.

I do remember a sandcastle thing I did, maybe the last time I did Ocean City with my folks before I went off to college. Rather than our usual August family vacation, we did a weekend in September when everything in that tourist town is dead quiet, the beaches with a handful of people. We stayed at the Stowaway Motel on 21st Street. (Why do I remember that?) I made then rather giant cone of sand, maybe 4 feet high, which I crowned with a crab exoskeleton I found. I remember some folks who came up the next day saying how they enjoyed spending all of the late day light watching my sand mountain take the hits (it was just a hump of sand in the morning).

So yeah, I love keeping my old sites up and going or at least archived, but who am I kidding? It’s all just sand piled up and the big waves will come one day. But its fun to build the walls oin defiance.

Featured Image: My own photo of one of several sand castles 2016/365/65 Built to Withstand the Sea flickr photo by cogdogblog shared under a Creative Commons (BY 2.0) license modified to slap my retired domains.

In that flu fog many key dates were missed – the date when I took a plane flight to Regina to meet Cori for our first “date” and also last weekend, the lap around the sun for old Felix (“hey, who is calling me old?”) who crossed his 12th solar orbit path last weekend. I patched together that 1, 2 = 12 collage on my phone from his puppy photo when maybe he was 5 months old at the Humane Society (they gave me a copy when I adopted him 2 years later) with a more recent photo.

That’s what you get for being 12 a list of photos. Here are ones I nabbed from eacy year he has been in my life on or close to his birthday.

Send cards and bones to Felix on Mastodon (all the cool dogs are federated!) @felixadog

Before Alan (2014)

That first summer I had Felix (2016), we went to a dog event in Flagstaff, and a rep from the Payson Humane Society recognized Felix. She emailed me his puppy day photo from his first adoption round there. She shared the story of his first name being “Strale” as an Italian word for lightning bolts like the marks he had on his puppy pose.

2016 (2 years old) First Birthday Together (Strawberry, AZ)

This was less than 2 months after his “Gotchya Day”, but he was settled into this cabin as his home.

2017 (3 years old) A Hike on the Mogollon Rim

After a year plus together, we had our routines down! Lots of walks. Getting a dog and doing many more walks (and a few other habit changes) yielded a blog worthy weight loss.

2018 (4 years old) At Home in Saskatchewan

All kinds of changes, same old peaceful sleeper. Cori and I were married, so dog and I packed up the truck and moved to a new home in Saskatchewan, both happier dogs for the change.

2019 (5 years old) Mortlach, SK

Indeed, a mighty fine present is a new rawhide.

2020 (6 years old) Saskatchewan, Pandemic Times

All that sleep and rest makes for time to ponder the world, the meaning of life, whether we would see our llamas on the next walk….

2021 (7 years old) At Ursa Acres

DON’T TEASE ME WITH CHEESE! flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0)

We had moved to our 16 acre rural homestead, and cheese is the upgraded gift from rawhide, maybe. Look at those eyes! Also this year, in one of those web serendipity things, an older Felix photo was requested for use to sell an interesting kind of Belgian dog food. Those stories only happen on the open web.

2022 (8 years old) At Ursa Acres

Indeed, another photo, you are 8 years old now, still looking good.

2023 (9 years old) At Ursa Acres

Still philosophizing from the floor position. At ease and calm, storing energy for our next walk. Or are we going camping soon? We did blog celebrate this year;s Gotchya Day

2024 (10 years old) At Ursa Acres

Looking good at double digits. This was a year the photos fell way behind schedule, closest I had to the May birthday date. But handsome! Adorable! Worthy of being a viral dog on Instagram!

2025 (11 years old) At Ursa Acres

For the 11th, and attempt to remake the puppy pose in the grass. The Strale marks are there, more faint. Same cute dog. Got a blog post out of the deal.

2026 (12 years old) At Ursa Acres

Here in year 12, Felix takes on the job of mentoring our new energetic puppy, Pimm. He does his best to stay up with her play moves, and we have seen evidence Felix has taught her to snow roll.

2027 (13 years old)

Stay tuned, the story and the photos go on! What more can I blog about these days than dogs?

Featured Image: Collage of my own CC0 images of Felix with a screenshot of just a few of the ones tagged Felix in Flickr (guess how many?) – since 2024 those get posted to Felix’s Mastodon @felixadog , he’s a tech savvy ActivityPub enabled dog.

(locals may notice that at about 21 minutes into the show when a stream of people walk in the background by as part of the Tunnels of Moose Jaw tour)

This was actually a re-do as one we had recorded earlier online something glitched with the audio, just as well because I think this conversation was better. Besides, it was an excuse to meet up in town.

We got to talking about my work at Open Education Global, banter about of course GenAI, the state as it were of social media, that there’s still goodness on the ‘net, how I got to Moose Jaw from Arizona, and a good chunk of how we really first connected, on digital (and non) storytelling. If you make it to the last question you will find I’ve been a a place in Saskatchewan that Dean (a native) has not been.

I’ve known Dean online through first the edtech bloggers to sometime in the mid or early 2000s, there really was a gold era then of Canadian ed tech folks I was fortunate to connect with through really just blogs, like for instance Dean, Rob Wall, and Alec Couros, way ahead of the curve on podcasting, had a long run of the EdTech Posse podcast “talking about education, especially from a Saskatchewan point of view.”

Sometime in 2006? 2007, definitely in 2008, Dean would email me with a requests be be a guest in his course at University of Regina to do talks on digital storytelling. The routine was an email would arrive from Dean with a subject line of “Me Again with a Favour?” Would that have been in the days of Elluminate? nope I think it was Skype and ustream.tv. I know I did one in 2008 while I was working remotely (for NMC) while house sitting in Iceland. It might have been this one or earlier that one of his students was Cori Saas, now my wife, she too then an active teacher blogger I connected with in the era.

Actually on the transCanada segment of my 2011 CogDogOdyssey road trip, on crossing Saskatchewan, I got to visit and stay wth all three of the original EdTech Posse folks. Here I had Dean do a Young Me/Now Me photo thing (was that a Ze Frank routine?) on that visit.

Dean was Canadian nice and gracious in talking about my various storytelling projects over the years. When he asked one that was a stand out for me, I was pleased to hear in response that he still makes use of Pechaflickr, heck it’s been too long since I tried it (yup, it still works).

I’m not sure I had too much profound to say on Dean’s show, but at least it was not all just the old web geezers show. Conversations, especially at coffee shops or as we also have done here on walks, are really the best kinds of connections one can have. The stuff we did than still matters now, just in a different, a more evolved, and often unanticipated context. We both agree on the value of storying.

Let’s coffee meet again, Dean, ok? The best thing is knowing I cracked the code

Featured Image: Unlocked flickr photo by cogdogblog shared under a Creative Commons (BY 2.0) license with irony a photo taken when I lived in Arizona and knew not the code.

Cough cough cough cough cough:

• Cough cough cough cough cough
• Cough cough cough, cough cough cough cough
• Cough cough cough cough cough cough cough cough cough.

Cough, cough cough cough cough cough cough cough cough cough cough cough cough cough cough cough cough.

Cough cough.

Cough.

Cough cough: Cough Cough Cough cough cough cough cogdogblog cough cough cough cough cough cough Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0)

It’s called “Virtual Painter” and is in a folder with a few other iOS apps that were more commonly used a decade ago to do creative fun with images- you upload a photo, and chose from a set of maybe five styles, and it turns a photo into an image that looks like it was painted say watercolor style or oil paint style.

Just for the heck of it, I loaded up a photo I took of our old yellow tractor (her name is Matilda, does anyone else also name all their vehicles?) rendering it with the style “Purts”. It’s rather nifty to my untrained art eye.

It’s described in the app as “Oil Painting: This is a conventional oil painting with a glaze finish. Broad strokes are used for the background while the detail is added with a finer brush.” If my phone were in a Flintstones episode, we’d peek inside to find some harried little bird painting with a brush.

I knew there was an extra story of the app, but the brain is fuzzy, right? Of course there’s a blog post, and darned if it’s just another rabbit holing story like part 2 of yesterday’s The Best Holes of Curiosity

This was classic. I noticed in flickr that a user name Taka Umemura had favorited a photo of mine and followed me. I maintain my still high level of disdain of the “like” button but for some reason (though I know when Bryan Alexander favorites a flickr photo he will reuse and attribute it in his blog), I was curious. I found that he had made a version of my photo of the dome of a building in Mexico that looked like it had a rough painted texture you could almost feel.

I commented on his photo my thanks for liking the photo and making an artistic version of it, asking how it was done. He replied:

Thank you very much. I’m glad to see your comment. I am providing some app on my web site. Please visit once.
www.livecraft.co.jp/EN/index.html

That was in 2015 that I was able to download from Taka’s site my copy of Virtual Painter.

I was thrilled to click 11 years later and see that his Livecraft site is not only still there, but he has continued to explore painting and storytelling even now with of course a bit of AI. The real joy is here is the effort of one single person expressed on their own web site.

But it also gets me wondering about the blurry lines between photo filter/alteration effects, which have been around a long time, and the current ranging crop of GenAI image tools. One could argue with me (and likely win) that there is no difference. Somewhere in Virtual Painter is an algorithm for altering the pixels of a photography to resemble the style of paintings.

To some degree I might not even care how I made an image, but more, does it please me? Does it communicate something I want to hang under me name? I have no real hand in what Virtual Painter does (well there is a slider for the effects intensity). Can I really claim I created that oil painting of a tractor?

Just for fun, I uploaded the same photo to ChatCPT, and asked it to create an oil panting style version of my tractor.

Personally I like the Virtual Painter one, but I guess I could re-prompt ChatGPT for more texture in the sky. I am not sure that is the point.

Which image to I feel more like it was me who created it? I can’t say. But the difference I can say is that the image pn the rate was the product of one digital artist, craftsperson in Japan, for whom I have had a small personal connection. As far as on the left? me and Sam are not in the same circle.

Is any of this meaningful? Maybe not (remember my brain is fuzzy today).

And all of this pales to the nearly accidental path I took years ago to find this app and make a broef connection with a Japanese digital artists.

So if there are two paths on the digital woods, that is to road I prefer taking.

Featured Image: Rendering in Virtual Painter app with purts style of my ohoto of a farm tractor. Do with it as you like!

That’s what the web, with all its current baggage and slopification still makes possible- through the humble hyperlink, open a door to an infinite number of stopping points. The fatigue of wondering about social media going somewhere is the expectation, desire that the scrolling through a stream, be it chronological or algorithm, will deliver to you something interesting. It’s passive.

The same for the insatiable appetite to type in a box and magic gigahedron eject an answer for you — strips the sheer delight of finding it yourself.

There is a time and use for these things, but it ain’t my whole webchilada (today is some kind of portmanteu day). But I have this we joy in trying to occasionally map out what seems to be statistically improbable paths. As I go via link to link, anyone of those stop and click points could have easily gone somewhere else (maybe better, maybe not). The odds of ending up on Romina’s story feel less than infinitessimal.

Dialling the web history back a few days, this is one hole.

The Links to Romina’s Story

So yes, it starts in scroll space, my Mastodon feed. What makes the social media valuable to finding worthy connections to people I do not know. I sift the streams. So I saw a boost or a comment from @paulwalk

One of the best places to start a curioisty path is someone’s profile. If it’s a “real” web service, its one with links you can click (coughigram). There’s decision and prioritizing over what link you put there (discounting the linktree idea), but typically it says what’s important to a person. Duh. (as does links in email, another good click jump point for me).

So yeah, I note Paul does consulting from the UK in open access research. I hop on the link train for what’s labeled his business Antleaf Consulting (great logo). I jump to work to see what kinds of stuff they do, anyone of the projects has some elements of interest, but given my work at OEGlobal, the first one for International Repositories Directory (IRD) looks interesting –

“COAR commissioned Antleaf to develop a directory of open-access repositories across the world.”

That seems a bookmarkablecsharable resource, a directory of open-access repositories. There’s a side trip to note (and bookmark) that COAR is the Coalition for Open Access Repositories. This is seeding my brain, heck maybe it is training, with stuff I might recall later. But onto the page about this IRD, which shows data for what it indexes, and interestingly, the count of repositories per continent:

Look how Europe leads the pack! It did not register yet the curiosity about the contintent with just 1 repository.

It was not right away obvious how to get in, but I tried the Repository Browser link and voila! I’m into a clean search interface. This could have been enough for me to stop and just pinboard the link, call it a web day.

But I am looking at the filters for country, and there again I see Antarctica with an indicator of 1 record. I just had to wonder, what open-access repository was down there? Some kind of science research one, most likely.

There it is, the entry for RUresearch Data Portal, probably something about penguins or ice core data, right? Not much info, it has not been renewed.

Again, this could have been the end of the link road, enough done? But I follow the title link and I’m drilling down into more metadata for RUResearch Data Portal, its owned by “Palmer Long Term Ecological Research” but the URL… https://rucore.libraries.rutgers.edu/research/ is a repo of research data at the Rutgers University library.

Hold the phone, that’s New Jersey, right? I’m on their site, reading info like:

“The RUresearch Data Portal provides a place for Rutgers researchers to share their research data with the global scholarly community. RUresearch leverages all the capabilities of RUcore and adds additional tools and services specific to research data.”

https://rucore.libraries.rutgers.edu/research/

Lots of RUs! Again, close window seems logical, but I glance at the sidebar on the lower right under a heading “Highlighted RUresearch Collections” is a link for Video Mosaic Collaborative — hey that sparks some interest.

Click.

Now the interest is rising, no longer caring about Antarctica:

The Video Mosaic Collaborative (VMC) is an interactive collaboration portal designed to enable teachers, teacher educators and researchers to analyze and utilize the real classroom videos shot over a span of 20+ years to make new discoveries in math education and transform mathematics research, teaching and learning.

https://rucore.libraries.rutgers.edu/vmc/

Research on 20 years of classroom videos? I am back on the click again train for the link labeled `https://videomosaic.org`

Oops.

One problem. The actual hyperlink has a typo in it, it points to `https://.videomosaic.org` (extra period in front of video, ooops). And this is where a crawler would stop right? Dead link, dead end.

Alas, I at the url bar can undo the typo to get to https://videomosaic.org

And wow, the project’s subtitle is “Watching students grow with math”

The Robert B. Davis Institute for Learning Collection of 300+ videos (100+ hours) consists of observational videos of students learning mathematical concepts. The videos were captured through a series of research projects studying the same student sample, from first grade through high school, 1992 to the present. The collection consists of video clips edited to highlight evidence of student reasoning and effective teaching practices as well as raw footage suitable for education and child development research. Additional video from 1,350 hours of raw footage continue to be added to this unique and growing collection. 30+ dissertations, 50+ articles and two books, with two additional books in production have resulted from research using this collection. Teaching principles modeled in the studies promote independent thinking and reasoning by students.

https://videomosaic.org

They tracked in video how students learned math over a span from grade to 12 (and beyond). Woah. From one of the front links I am now into their case study of Romina, a student they recorded videos of her mathematical reasoning from 1st grade 1992 through the end of high school and later as she went to work as a consultant and ultimately a final video in 2006 as an MBA graduate.

These are among 300 videos for this project, a part of larger corpus of research at Rutgers University, and itself one of 7000+ repositories of open-access research published globally.

Getting here from a Mastodon user profile seems magical. And it makes even more clear how vast this web is, and how impossible it is to know it all or even in part.

Hole 2: From #Small Web to Netizen Ideas

This path is shorter, and again, spawned by almost luck. I have in my RSS reader a feed for the #Smallweb tag in Mastodon. I glance at it irregularly, but it was almost the same day as hole 1 that I went down again spotting this item as it was in my reader:

Nothing about it I can recall jumping out, and the first hashtags might be a move on warning, but the phrase on the web not being built for profit and the word Netizen sparked something (the URL seems to be a shortener, so no clue).

What a great delight to find that this was a post by Derek Sivers titled indeed Netizen – read it, it’s very short. But he talks about finding his way to the internet in 1993 (about the same time I did) and how it was a space where people were just more than eager to share and help.

Slowly the culture around me changed, so now it seems I need to explain my strange behavior — why I don’t monetize everything like everyone else. I’m just a product of my place and time. 1993 shaped how I think of the internet, and I’m keepin’ on in that original spirit.

Like picking up trash where you walk, even if the rest of the world is full of litter. You keep doing what you can to make things better.

https://sive.rs/netizen

Derek offers the 3 things he commits to in this vein – he answer emails from everyone who emails him (10,000 oer year, guess who is adding to his total; running NowNowNow.com an aggregation of individual web sites with “now” pages (I’ve seen this somewhere), and the most doable one I will pledge to– keep sharing everything he can on his site.

The thing I know him for is a video someone (I am thinking maybe Darren Kuropatwa, where are ya buddy?) shared with me long long ago when I was doing those not antiquated presentations/keynotes on sharing, that so full gets to a main reason educators don’t share- they downplay their own work. Here from 2011 and still feels right today

In fact I just used it a few months ago in a small contribution I made to an article in the CHallnges of Sharing feature- From Judgement to Sharing: Rethinking Teaching Practices in the Era of Open Education.

It’s that good.

Be more Netizen, eh?

That was just two link paths down the web rabbit hole and back. I still love using intution to follow links (which more often than not hits dead ends).

Holes of interest still for me.

Featured Image: Holes of Interest flickr photo by cogdogblog shared under a Creative Commons (BY 2.0) license

Like as if anyone noticed. The week of no blogging has passed for the annual / well sort of annual Week of only Commenting on Other Blogs, so the posts can come flooding out.

I posted Zero posts over the last week and (tried to) keep my Mastodon posting to just linking to the blogs I had commented on. For tracking, I tagged these #CogDogCommentBlogging26 maybe a whopping 20 of them

Of course its a challenge as many blogs lack comments. Many I have to wait for an email link to log in to a newsletter site. One I did that and it was still lacking comments. I figured out how to do a few DS106 Daily Creates as I could post them as comments.

Random notes:

• I commented on Dean Shareski’s Circles and Rectangles post a day before I met him for lunch in Moose Jaw. Hey, I forgot to ask him the trick to see the circles!
• danah boyd’s Where Has Social Media Gone led to a lot of thought and some later discussion, I maintain we are not passive players here, we chose to go/stay to these silos. Completely impossible to comment, I even tried an email (I knew danah when she was on NMC board).
• Enjoyed seeing a typically wonderful person photo in flickr by Kris Krug who I had not crossed paths with since the Northern Voice days and hanging out at SXSW in 2008. I said hi in a comment but replying to ones own comments seems old school as well.
• Nobody hosts a better blog comment party than the Jim Groom, NOBODY, could not help but chime in another to the river at Thank God I’m Saved
• I had to give D’Arcy Norman’s Jelly Board a try, commented (and he did back). DWDD always.
• Followed Andy Rush’s video mastodon post to a 2014 post by Jim, so I had to drop in a comment like I was a time traveler.
• Still rolling around by brain the deep comparison of “literacy-slop” to “taste-slop” in a good long read by Doug Belshaw (alas with Ghost you won’t see a trackback ping). Also, still smiling at his closing toss of “sloptimism”
• Almost on the wild random link, my RSS feed for the #SmallWeb tag led to beautiful post by Derek Sivers on being a netizen. Wow, what a site and sporit he has (added the blog feed to be reader). He has a thing of a promise to answer every email sent to him, I’m gonna try. I have used so many times his video of Obvious to You, Amazing to Others.

Hardly earth shattering nor a huge amount of commenting. Still, I am going to try again!

But as of this post, the CogDogBlog is ON.

Featured Image: Remix of my own photo Turned On flickr photo by cogdogblog shared under a Creative Commons (BY 2.0) license with a layered screen shot of this blog, and my logo.

A well worn topic here is the idea of commenting on blogs as a form of blogging itself (tagged blogmenting), writing in the spaces of other people’s blogs. Twenty blog years ago I reflected on the idea of Francois the Comment Blogger (actually spotted back in 2003 as Blogging in the Margins) who, in a weird twist of accidents, I actually “met” last year, in, as expected, the comments space of a post by Kathleen Fitzpatrick. Rather epic, I thought!

All of this leading up to an idea in 2007 where it was a major thing to give up, of “muzzling” posting on my own blog for a whole week (can you imagine) and spending that week reading and commenting on other people’s blogs. I repeated this in 2008, 2009, 2010,… and took 15 years off before picking it in 2025.

I had usually done this in February, and had “plans” to return this year, so hey, here I am two months late.

Now of course, given that like 94.6% of people who previously blogged (made up statistic) do not any more, what is the bog sacrifice? The whole space of connecting through comments has pretty music been desiccating by taking that energy and effort into external places of social media, severed from our blogs. And of those remaining blogs, like 68.2% (made up too) have removed comments as even an option.

I thought about this reading danah boyd’s post Where has Social Media gone? (a great read). She closes at the end with “And if you have feels, push back! I’d love to hear your thoughts!!!” but how? Her original blog has no means to do that. The Ghost version of her blog as Made Not Found even if I log in, does not have a place to respond?

It seems telling to me.

Alas, so just giving up my own blogging for a week does not seem much, so here’s my only partly thought out idea- I will also [mostly] muzzle by usual outputs in Mastodon, now that is something to give up. I wil take that time to read a lot of blog posts, where I can comment, and slip in to my comment the text #CogDogCommentBlogging26 and then I will just post to Mastodon a link to where I am commenting tagged same.

As part of the past efforts here, I generate some stats for my own blog activity, using some special MySQL queries to pull out per year, total number of posts, number of comments, number of unique commenters into a google sheet of all CogDogBlog stats Back to the Beginning of Blog Time – look charted data!

Now hold the dog bus, you might say- look at the huge spike of comments in 2025, where’s the problem? That’s an artifcact of enabling the WordPress ActivityPub plugin on the site, those record numbers include all the likes, boosts that get fed into the comments table. I might have to wrangle a new query to filter them out. A task for another day.

At least for posts, I had a positive blip from the declining trend in 2025 and 4 months into the year, I’m at more than half of that total. It’s a BULL market, folks! But wow, look at those peak blogging years of 2005. Crazy. Was I even working?

Lastly, I do have a query to retrieve the top commenters for the 2025 year

SELECT comment_author, count( * ) AS acnt FROM `wp_comments` WHERE comment_date >= '2025-01-01' AND comment_date < '2026-01-01' GROUP BY comment_author ORDER BY acnt DESC;

The results are again, with me at the top of my charts! I am the most active commenter (there is duplication from comments via Fedviserse reply and direct to blog). I am running out of time to make this a pretty table, so a screen shot of the text (I cut off the tail end at less than 5)

Well, that’s enough, I am supposed to muzzle the blog today, and get out there and comment. If you got blog or a post I should attend to, I ma taking suggestions, otherwise I rely on my usual RSS feeds and Mastodon reading (mostly reading this week).

See you on the other side, when the muzzle is removed…. if I remove it.

Keep on blogging! And be old school and give out some human direct comments, it feeds the bloggers soul.

Featured Image: Dog with party hat and muzzle at a loud event looking scared, crazed and helpless flickr photo by Ivan Radic shared under a Creative Commons (BY 2.0) license this is so how dignified I am in my withering intents!

But it was meant to be this past week was old school blogging the way I wrote them in say 2004. Short bits of anything. Everything. Mostly text. Where the “blogiverse” as it was called poured attention, into their own blogs, and into others to comment.

Before the so called “social” medias landed and para-took our attentions to them. Did they really “take”, how much did we cave in?

That’s another post out in the field.

Next week, no posts.

On purpose.

Stay tuned, zero one two blog readers.

featured image: Holding this Post Together flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0)