I LEARN BY LOOKING BACK and that's certainly true when sifting through a day's notes after the #digitalhorizon meeting in Dublin, Ireland. The accompanying word cloud offers a good summary.
At Farmleigh with John Breslin
Continue reading "Distilling DigitalHorizon" »
TWO PEOPLE THIS WEEK have talked about art on the hill above Clonmel five years ago. That's significant.
I walked through wet fields with 29 others in August 2006, discovering my Cat hillwalking boots weren't waterproof. The hike took us to Larry Kennedy's field, located directly above the centre of Clonmel. Up there we created a piece of large visual art for people to enjoy. Long before Audioboo, I created the sound of my walkabout [19.5 MB 96 kbps MP3 file]. It was a fun day, and even more special that we mounted a large installation with a group of people who didn't know one another. We've got six times the number of people on the LIT-Clonmel campus than the original group involved in the Hill Art Project. And some of us are thinking about making an even more dramatic intervention on the pastures above the campus.
Podcasting.ie -- "Art on the Hill" was made while taking the hillside displayed in the Tipperary photostream on Flickr.
STEVE CHEN AND CHAD HURLEY are the two reasons I'm still using Delicious as a social bookmarking service. [Image by Jim Wilson/NYT.]
Those two entrepreneurs have a vision that will change the home page at Delicious into browseable “stacks,” or collections of related images, videos and links shared around topical events. That's hyperlocal on steroids for me. They also plan to offer Delicious personalised recommendations for me, based on my sharing habits. At the moment, most of my sharing is among educators. I'm also trying to ensure my most advanced students get into the sharing routine as well because it's a life skill.
Continue reading "Two Reasons I'm Sticking on Delicious" »
The Video Coat is a color TV set built into a lab coat.
It is a 160x120 pixel color LED display, built on flex boards, attached to a standard lab coat. This television set displays regular NTSC video powered by a standard iPod. David Forbes designed and built it for Burning Man as he explains in the video below the break.
I've been hunting for some sort of LED array for my personal attire ever since spotting Uranium Jeans in 2006. The scrolling LED text, displayed by an embedded flexible micro screen, can be changed via text messaging from a mobile phone.
Continue reading "Some Day I Will Have a Video Coat" »
A FEW HOURS AGO, Liam Daly, an industrious painter on a stretched bicycle, pointed his rig west and continued his painting tour across the 32 counties of Ireland.
Liam is a gold-plated member of the Irish twitterati and perhaps the most digitally connected of any traditional artist in Ireland. Because he is a man of the land, he knows the service side of online social networking. He carries a full complement of paints, brushes, canvases, sketchbook and sctatch work. All on a stretched bicycle that he pedals along the back roads of Ireland. He is also permanently connected to a virtual world, communicating by text, map pinpoints, photostreams, and Audioboos during the day. Then he does "art stuff" for five hours a day when out of the saddle. He is a nomad who is using social media to get places to stay in exchange for pieces he paints. Speaking from experience, he gives more than he gets.
Continue reading "The Day the Nomad Cycled By" »
BECAUSE I WANT TO HEAR the many voices behind Liam Daly's Painting Tour, I'm loaning the cycling artist my iPod Touch and related peripherals.
This is a big deal for me on several levels because I've integrated the iPod Touch into my daily routine and now I've got to fill that audio gap with my Sony Ericsson Xperia Arc. The iPod Touch is one of the best devices on the planet to record social audio on the fly. I use it to make Audioboos and as you might be able to tell from the photo, I have a Griffin lapel mic that makes recording a totally hands-free affair. That's important for a cyclist who needs to use both hands to maneuver around the country roads of Ireland where the Painting Tour goes. In a perfect world, I'll amend this blog post with the first Paintingtour Audioboo made with my loaner gear. If the sound clips are as compelling as I think they will be, I'll redirect the top banner of my website to #paintingtour audio. In the meantime, if you want to watch one of the most dynamic manifestations of social media to weave around Ireland, you should follow @eolai on Twitter and PicPlz. The tweets and the snaps offer a colourful ride through 32 counties for a casual viewer. And Liam has marked out a collection of roads, pubs, B&Bs and scenery that I'm going to follow with relatives visiting from the States.
More on the Painting Tour: "Eolaí and his Painting Tour: Week Five" on the Thirsty Gargoyle Blog, August 4, 2011.
ONE OF MOST BREATH-TAKING features of new social networks like Google Plus is seeing the work of others through another perspective.
It's easy to really really enjoy the work of Trey Ratcliff if you let his imagery slip through your browser's circles on Google Plus. I'm watching his flow of HD shots every day, hoping to spot one of Ireland soon.
Watch Trey Ratcliff on http://youtu.be/PXOh9TQvOP0 or see his portfolio.
I ARRIVED IN IRELAND in late 1994 and that was the first time I heard the term "gobsmacked". A learned Irish flatmate told me "gob" was Irish for "beak" and then the term made sense to me. And right away "gobshite" had a deeper meaning too. If you search Google News for references to the non-hyphenated word, it looks like the first time it surfaced was in Chemistry World on 11 March 1985.
... was just absolutely gobsmacked when the results came in I personally did the analysis and it was just blindingly obvious that every single character ...
Google Books (includes magazines) offers up the New Scientist, March 7, 1985.
Our online dictionaries in Tipperary Institute give the etymology.
gobsmacked, adj. UK slang
Pronunciation: /ˈgɒbsmækt/
Etymology: < gob n.2 + smacked adj. at smack
Flabbergasted, astounded; speechless or incoherent with amazement.
1985 Guardian 23 Feb. 19/3 Last Tuesday I shook him [sc. Sir Stanley Matthews] by the hand.‥ On the red shale Spion Kop where, 40 years ago, I used to stand to see Wednesday play, I would have been described as ‘gob-smacked’.
1987 J. Curran K2 (1989) i. vii. 88 The event that really caused raised eyebrows was that the Frenchman, Benoît Chamoux, had climbed the Abruzzi in only twenty-four hours! ‘Gobsmacked’ was the only word to describe our reactions.
1989 Jackie 25 Nov. 43/1 Won't they be gobsmacked when you tell them that you wrote to me?
I've been out of the States to notice whether anything would gobsmack me at home.
Gobsmacked on Flickr. Image is the gobsmacked Shola.
Bonus Info on Gobbledygook.
I LIKE EOLAI'S idea of cycling through all 32 counties on a painting tour of Ireland. More than that, I like the idea of having him spending enough time in Cashel to sketch a rough drawing of Hore Abbey, the historical ruin across the street from our home. We have a young artist in the house (working at right) who would like to colour inside the lines of the artwork. She prides herself in her emergent artwork. But there's something else I'd like to watch evolve during Eolai's two-month trip around the island. I'd like to sponsor his Trip Journal. Hopefully, he'd make an entry each day as well as an entry for each county that he visited. I'd like to use the notebook in my Media Writing module during the upcoming semester because I consider journaling to be a core skill of every creative.
Eolai's paintings of travels
.Follow www.paintingtour.com
Sent mail2blog using O2 Typepad service from my Nokia E7 in the Poppyfields, County Tipperary, Ireland.
