During the last week read a few reports about Swurl. I have some good news and a point that I think is not so good. Some background, the good news and then some potential bad news follows. [Please not my addendum too]

The initial reference to the tool that caught my eye was made by Jane on her excellent eLearning Pick of the Day blog. I was then impressed with the screen shot on the Read/Write Web review of the tool. Since then Silvia Tolisano and Alan Levine have blogged about the tool.

I have been looking for something to replace my Jaiku badge as its servers are down quite often and I cannot perceive that any changes have been made to Jaiku since Google purchased the company last October. I thought that perhaps Swurl was the answer. As I mentioned I was impressed with the screen shot published as part of the report. I thought, “Could this replace my Jaiku badge?”

After reading the review I skipped over to Swurl and signed up. I was able to plug into my blog, twitter, del.icio.us and Last.FM feeds. That was all. For some reason I could not plug into my Flickr feed. I made several attempts. No luck.

So, I left a question on their suggestion page. More on that in a moment. Anyway, this morning I received an email from Jonathan Neddenriep at Swurl. He is pictured here with the other chap behind Swurl, Ryan. These gentlemen are real. Their feedback is excellent. This is impressive.

Jonathan mentioned in the email that they had added an additional feature that allowed you to enter the full url of your Flickr account. It worked for me. I could switch on Flickr. I think this level of support is brilliant. Simply outstanding. That is the good news.

Now, Swurl is good but it is not the solution for me. I was after a sidebar badge that could replace Jaiku but it was not to be. Perhaps one day Swurl will have a badge that I can embed on my home page. The Jaiku badge there takes in all my feeds (except Twitter ~ my choice) and it acts like a “What’s New” for my site and feeds. 

Now, for the not so good point. There is one thing that concerns me about Swurl. When you mouse over any post or entry on your Swurl page a hidden comment field appears. Anyone can comment. What if spammers get a hold of this? It could become a nightmare. Even each individual Twitter post allows for comments. See below.

The comment feature needs to have controls not unlike that of a blog in my opinion. This has been raised on the Swurl suggestion page.

Addendum. Now for some more good news. This blog post has received a comment from Jonathan Neddenriep at Swurl. These guys are brilliant! Please read Jonathan’s comment below. Excellent.

Liberation

One of the best decisions I have made recently was to follow my gut feeelings and rename my blog. Formally it was called TeachTech but as you can see I renamed the blog Watershed, last Sunday.

It is a liberating feeling as I now no longer feel constrained by the TeachTech title and technology tips tag line. Sure, there will be technology and teaching notes in the future yet there will also be additional posts that reflect on day to day life, often with an education bent. I shall endeavour to include the addendum at the conclusion of each post where I briefly outline how I created the post and its contents. I feel that readers may find that useful.

Some sage advice from a couple of curious Corellas

So, if you have ever thought about renaming your blog, particularly if you feel it will more accurately reflect how you feel and write, then do so now.

How did I create this post? I took each photograph using a Nikon D-70 several years back. I uploaded the images to my Mac using a USB 2.0 card reader. This is much faster than using the USB cable that came with the camera. I imported the second image into Comic Life and added the word balloons, etc. I exported the Comic as a jpeg image and then resized it in Adobe Photoshop Elements. I resized each image down to a width of 400 pixels and 72dpi for inclusion in this blog and exported each using the Save For Web… option which allows you to fine tune file size and quality. I used CyberDuck to upload each image to my host site. I have also linked to the galleries that contain other photographs taken at the same time as those displayed in this post.

Well, in the last two days I have signed up to not one, not two but three new “Web 2.0 tools”. I was intrigued by Posterous and it’s incredible ease of use. One can perform many tasks simply via email ~ a tool that many are quite adept at using already. Why not use Posterous to set up a blog? I signed up. Three bloggers have highlighted Posterous during the last 24 hours, namely Larry Ferlazzo, Michelle Martin and Silvia Tolisano. It is certainly an interesting tool and I shall be sharing it with my colleagues this Thursday.

Earlier this evening I received an email invite from Clay Burell to join Plurk and I did. It looks neat. I will give it a go. I had read about it on Read~Write Web some time back and it has popped up in a few posts and tweets as a possible alternative to the long suffering Twitter.

Then, since I was seemingly in a drunken web 2.0 haze I signed up for Diigo despite my digs here, here and here (scroll down) I will have to thoroughly explore Diigo in order to derive the greatest benefit from this tool. Well, it has been 3 months since the big Diigo whirlwind of last March so I here I am all signed up and I even joined a few groups.

But, I signed up for Posterous within 24 hours of its discovery and for Plurk the second I read Clay’s invite. I did not allow time to frame my decision. I jumped straight in. Web 2.0 overdose. Bless me father for I have sinned.

How did I create this post? My wife took my photograph using a small Casio digital camera. I uploaded the image to my Mac using a USB 2.0 card reader. I imported the image into Comic Life and added the word balloons, etc. I exported the Comic as a jpeg image and then resized it in Adobe Photoshop Elements and exported it using the Save For Web option which allows you to fine tune file size and quality. I used CyberDuck to upload the image plus the various logos that I had screen captured via SharpShooter,

During the last few weeks a significant number of blog posts and ‘tweets’ on Twitter have been along these lines:

“Just a week to go before I am off to the NECC”
“Five days to go and I will be at the NECC”
“NECC next week!”
“NECC here I come!”
“Packing my bags for the NECC!”
“So excited about going to NECC!”
“At last, just about to hop on a plane for the NECC”
“Sitting in an airport lounge… NECC is my next stop”

The education networks are inundated with the term NECC (just like this blog post). Thinking about it, the fact that the term is prevalent in so many posts would make searching for relevant data regarding the NECC a little more challenging.

Something else crossed my mind as well. The NECC has been around for nearly thirty years now and I wonder if the demographics of the attendees has altered during the previous three decades. In particular, has the advent of the read~write web (aka Web 2.0) had an impact on the demographics at the conference?

Will there be hard core programming types mingling with newbie, web 2.0 entranced teachers? Will the educators that have their roots in command line interfaces cope with the Twitterers in their midst? What will the mix be I wonder?

Wish I was there.

Three happy blokes

Westley Field, an old sparring partner of mind from that good old multimedia days at the University of Wollongong is always at me to be ‘online’ more often. That is, he often mentions that he cannot find me so to that end I have been leaving Skype and iChat online. Well, Westley and I have have had more chats of late and more collaborations have been generated as a result.

Well, last weekend I had a quick chat with Westley while he was in San Francisco and I knew he was heading over to Strawberry to take a canoe ride with Alan Levine. Well the iChat was fired up and we three managed to get in a quick conversation. It was good to actually speak with Alan (and Westley too!). All previous communications had been comment exchanges about recycling wood and interesting conference speakers.

Nothing serious. Quick chat about canoeing, looking for water, dogs, cats, absent principals, meeting my wife, NECC, July meetup, my next trip to Singapore, Skoolabarate Congress 2008 and the possibility of dragging Alan across to Singapore in February of next year for a conference. Laughed about collaborations, being high maintenance, and adventures abroad.

A nice moment all in all. Technology can be good. It’s wireless. Its now. Think about it. Half a world away from each other, sixteen hours apart, yet three blokes share a laugh, swap a few notes and cement those bonds.