spell with photos
What follows doesn’t have much to do with pedagogy of online teaching and learning, but it’s a pretty cool little application of web 2.0 technology! I came across a little Flickr utility that lets you spell any word or series of words with photos from Flickr. Great for visually representing an acrostic or key term…
To get your own, visit http://metaatem.net/words
50 sec. video introduction to Google Reader
Here's a great 50 second video introduction to Google Reader. You can check out the video here or try Google Reader for yourself at reader.google.com.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=5980861656829941065ooVoo - FREE video chat tool
iPhone optimized
Thanks to postings from Veronica Belmont and TUAW, I stumbled across a great plugin for Wordpress called iWPhone that optimizes a Wordpress blog for viewing on the iPhone or iPod Touch. I’ve installed this plugin on on this blog, but since I don’t yet have an iPhone myself, I’ve not been able to see yet first-hand how the blog displays on either an iPhone or iPod touch. My next trip to an Apple store however, I’ll definitely be giving this a try!
For those of you who do happen to have an iPhone, I’d love it if you could try accessing this blog with your iPhone and drop me a comment with your feedback on how the blog displays for you. Even better yet, if you are able to somehow grab a screen capture and can send that my way, that’d be even better!
I’m hoping there’s an iPhone in my future…if AT&T would only expand it’s network so that usage wasn’t so limited or if they would allow Apple to open up VoIP on the iPhone so that calls could be made over WiFi, that would be enough to put me over the edge to becoming an iPhone convert.
Along the lines of optimizing Web content for iPhone, I also just came across a great piece free software for Mac OS X called iPhoney that allows for a Web developer to preview a website how it will be rendered on an iPhone. I’ve tried this out and it works really well. However, the software doesn’t recognize the mimic the browser type for iPhone-specific CSS, so I wasn’t able to use the app to test my blog optimizations. Again, I hope someone out there who is privileged to have an iPhone can get in touch.
Twitter vs. Jaiku?
vs. 
While I’ve not yet done a whole lot with the microblogging tool Twitter, I just came across this thorough introduction to how one might use Twitter.
If you want to give Twitter a try, you can sign-up for a free account here. You can find me at Twitter at http://twitter.com/jrhode
I wonder as enamored as it seems young people are these days with texting and social networking tools like this, are us “old folks” missing out by not being actively involved in the whole social presence phenomenon?
While I’m going to give Twitter a try and keep an open mind about it, I must admit that I’m really apprehensive about taking the time to post what I’m doing. Does anyone really care anyway what I’m doing? I know there are people who do, but will they want to subscribe follow me electronically? Maybe they do…and I’m being totally “20th century” about this.
Anyway…I’d love to hear from anyone who is either actively using Twitter, Jaiku, or some other microblogging tool. Or, maybe you’re considering just trying one. What are your thoughts on this?
Another question I’m going to throw out…what’s the big difference between Twitter and Jaiku? I’ve got a Jaiku account as well, but I’m not sure why I would want to use one over the other. Certainly, the fact the Google now owns Jaiku certainly catapults the development capital and potentially the longevity of Jaiku.
Chime in with your thoughts!