Just heard from a colleague about an unfortunate? release of a new cookbook. It seems a very well known chef who is also an international television personality has just written another book and unfortunately it seems a Word version has escaped from the publisher so it is now flying around the Internet uncontrollably.
If this is all true and the leak was accidental, I wonder what happened to the poor person who was responsible. Here’s a dilemma for the author - what should he do? He is extremely well known and well liked and very, very successful (ie well off). Here’s a suggestion - the book’s out now so potentially hundreds of thousands of Net (email) users have it already or soon will. How about making it an ‘open source’ (excuse the pun) cookbook. Make it Creative Commons or something similar. No doubt many, many people will purchase the high quality print version but why not have a free one too? Give it to the community although as I understand it, the cook in question is already one of the most generous and does an awful lot for people in need already.

The Internet is a fantastic thing but this does serve as an illustration of how seemingly naive actions can very quickly get out of control. If this all did happen a number of people will probably have been hurt in some way because of this unfortunate event.

Following up on this story - it appears it was a hoax (and also not so new) but it is still makes an interesting hypothetical. What could you or would you have done in if you found yourself in a similar situation - try and recover some of what may have been lost, turn it round and exploit the marketing potential of it through the web’s viral marketing reach etc.

Cheers, and good cooking.

Original post by jleeson and software by Elliott Back

A little belated but happy birthday to the mobile learning blog and well done Leonard on the success you are having with this blog.

Cheers,
Jerry.

Original post by jleeson and software by Elliott Back

I love mashups - here’s one combining a couple of my favourite services.

twittervision.

Original post by jleeson and software by Elliott Back

Well, SEOmoz’s 2007 Web 2.0 Awards have been out for a couple of weeks now. All the usual suspects are there such as technorati, bloglines, magnolia, furl, yahoo! local, craigslist, google docs, feedburner, 43 things, google maps, frappr, ning, flickr, picasa, linked in, digg, del.icio.us, pageflakes, and of course, YouTube. As you can see, there are quite a few google and yahoo! services in the mix. If you have a look at all the awards, you will find even more google and yahoo! services. What surprised me was the number of ’same old same old’ in the list. Some of these have been around for quite a long time now and perhaps are just part of the fabric - we really depend on them and use them all the time. If you have a look at the criteria by which they are measured (usability, usefulness, social aspects, interface and design, content quality) it is easy to see why they are there (again). Since there are ‘over 200 sites in 41 categories’ there is a lot to look at so quite a bit of time and effort must go into producing these awards. It’s really worth checking them out and seeing if you can find something that works for you. Here’s a few interesting ones:

1. donors choose - teachers submitting ideas for funding
2. be Green - highly topical at the moment - look at the carbon calculator
3. a couple of interesting hosted wikis (wetpaint, pbwiki) - check out the student/teacher example in pbwiki
4. twitter - my views here

Of course there are many more to look at and it would take hours to go through the lot of them.

technorati tags: Web 2.0 Awards

Original post by jleeson and software by Elliott Back

auDA, the Australian Domain name Administrator has released an interesting issues paper from their 2007 Names Policy Panel. From the auda site:

auDA’s 2007 Names Policy Panel is currently reviewing the policy framework for .au domain names, including:

* whether .au should be opened up to direct registrations (eg. domainname.au)
* whether the policy rules for domain names should be changed
* whether registrants should be allowed to sell their .au domain names.

The Panel has released an Issues Paper, May 2007 which sets out the current situation and invites comment on suggestions and options for change.

This could have implications for all Australian domain name users, including closed domains such as gov.au and edu.au. The paper is here if you are interested.

Original post by jleeson and software by Elliott Back

When I get this to work (using javascript in Wordpress doesn’t seem to be too easy for me), the accompanying video message should speak for itself. As I state in it, I am not sure whether this is a useful thing or a really annoying popup. However, I am sure some people will find some interesting uses for it.

Cheers,

Jerry.

technorati tags: Bubble Guru

Original post by jleeson and software by Elliott Back

Ever wonder what Australians are searching for (at least on the Internet).  Here’s an interesting article on their Australian blog.  Pity they didn’t recognise other cities besides Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Canberra and Perth.  The underlying tool - Google Trends - is  interesting to look at too.

I’d like to see what educators / learners are searching for.  Maybe something similar could be implemented on edna, myfuture or some of the other services we run.

technorati tags: google

Original post by jleeson and software by Elliott Back

We have been spending quite a bit of time looking at ePortfolio services lately and one of the interesting ideas that I have looked at is the JISC ePortfolio Reference model. ePortfolios address a wide range of applications and the idea of integrating simple services into an ‘ePortfolio engine’ has a lot of appeal to me. There are many services that could be integrated to form an ePortfolio solution including identification, authentication, blogging, artefact management, aggregation, syndication, competencies, presence, presentation, transcript validation, resume builder etc. Processing RPL (recognised prior learning) can be a problem for learners as well as institutions. Perhaps a service could be developed similar to resume builders (such as the Europass) that helps a learner document their RPL in a manner that maximises their chances for a successful RPL claim and also eases the processing of the claim by the assessor.

Original post by jleeson and software by Elliott Back