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)

I spot a few of my custom t-shirts , and yes snow and dogs on it, old wood, skies of northern and other lights, the usual wood patterns, even a cat. But let’s hand it over, as the world capitulates more each minute, to ChatGPT to see what kind of drippy summary it can conspire.

It took a whole (not) of prompt engeering to send

Here are 30 photos taken in April. This screenshot of photos represents one month of photos taken each day in April. Write a one paragraph summary that captures themes, common topics, and also anything that stands out from the rest. Add extra zest and exuberance to your writing.

Here is the prosaicness:

April arrives like a switch flipped with a grin, not fully spring yet, but definitely done pretending it’s winter. Snow retreats into scraps while grass and mud claim the middle ground, and the light gets theatrical: halos around the sun, a sudden aurora cameo, skies that can’t decide between steel and silk. The usual prairie artifacts are still here, splintered boards, rusted bolts, fence lines stretching like sentences without punctuation, but now they feel less like relics and more like props in a set being reset. Life pushes in from every angle: dogs in mid-romp and mid-thought, birds slicing the air in formation, a cat inspecting plumbing like it’s a personal project, even a soccer ball abandoned as if the game just paused itself. People step closer to the lens this month, smiling, holding up small finds, wearing their days a bit more openly. And then there are the delightful curveballs: a memory card like a tiny black monolith, a giant “house volume” knob that looks ready to turn the whole scene up, a shirt declaring “ai;dr” like a wink at the act of documenting it all. April feels curious, awake, slightly chaotic, and very alive, as if the world is stretching its limbs and saying, alright, let’s get on with it.

The poet loriat ChatGPT waxes on my 30 daily photos

Note that it missed complete the mockery of the ai;dr shirt with “a shirt declaring “ai;dr” like a wink at the act of documenting it all” – no I am casting share your way, ChatGPT.

May is already in gear, so no looking back now, heading for another perfect month of daily photos, that is north of fourth.

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

In yesterday’s early morning Mastodon scroll I saw a link to Anil Dash’s post that seemed to be, if you judged on title alone, an inquiry about NASA Artemis II photos.

I gave it the quick scan scroll, which spoke to wanting go read it in more detail. After the morning dog walk. By the time I had returned, my friend Gardner Campbell had emailed me asking, have you read this with the same said link.

I leave it as an exercise for the link clicker, if they do that anymore, to read it on their own. It’s a loving tribute to flickr which at 22 years old is earlly Cambrian era for a web site that is not oly still there, but still vital.

Even better is the link to the email interview conversation posted by Jessamyn West on the flickr blog (they have a real honest blog, reason enough for love) Anil Dash – using community to build power, for the rich observations, as well as a nice set of photos.

I had to add my flickr love to the pile.

Alan is @cogdog ??

@cogdog@cosocial.ca

@anildash Not enough characters here to be unhip to shout how much I love flickr

https://cogdogblog.com/2024/02/flickr-at-20/

Worth mentioning they never wrecked their public API, allowing amateurs like me to create my own tools/sites. And so early they were with tags when we swooned over "folksonomy". There's an almost infinite spiral of niche interest groups (e.g. for rusty mailboxes? Vegefitti?).

Note: Flickr Commons long preceded SmugMug

April 30, 2026, 2:51 pm 0 boosts 6 favorites

Not to toot my own post horn, but I stand by the 20 love reasons from 2024 (noting many more I could add if I was that OCD).

Instead, I will link share something that encompasses many of these love reasons. See if you can guess the tag represented by 10 random flickr photos in my pechaflickr web site.

It’s not hard.

Or just play with pechaflickr on your own. The whole idea was to maskup pechakucha with those fun Powerpoint Karaoke things people did long ago at conferences. It’s a vehicle for improv. It got good mentions in the Twitter era, I am not sure anyone really uses it any more besides me.

First of all, I web duct taped this together in 2011 — and it still works (there might be a few PHP worms to fix). It’s made possible because of flickr’s public API, which, unlike almost every other Big Powerful Web Platform, has not broken, changed, or removed since it started. I have been told by someone who knows APIs that its maybe a gold standard. Pechaflickr makes use of the freeform, web 2 hippie style joy of folksonomy of tags, the old school style before that got all hashed to virality. I have a mode where you can draw just images from Flickr Commons… because I can.

And the whole mode where I can use it to make you guess a tag, came as a suggestion from a teacher in Alaska named Heather.

I am biased, and smitten, and others may have gripes with ther object of my affection, but I will say until the future grim day if the web blinks out… I love flickr.

Featured Image: Screenshot of search results for all my photos tagged flickr which works in 2026 as it always has done.