Few days go by.

Long-time climbing friend from high school contacts me out of the blue today via SMS. Haven’t talked to him in four years or more. Knows I’m living in Brooklyn. He’s living in Brooklyn too. Tells me story of how one of his friends purchased chairs on Craigslist. Is asked whether, off chance, he knows Daniel Bachhuber.

Boom, small world.

Head upstairs into my apartment.

Another friend txts and asks whether I want to get roommate birthday pizza in West Village and then hit the bars. Feeling social again. Take subway back into the city. Arrive at Numero 28 before others and request a table for five. “Oh no, six,” my friend clarifies, “one other dude is going to join.”

Wait at the table 10 minutes.

Boom, up walks long-time climbing friend. “Oh, no way. Do you know Tyler?”

Even smaller world.

Money quote on Romenesko today from a Chronicle article covering the techies doing it in-house.

In house, we’ll offer blogs for student and classroom use from a WordPress 3.0 multisite instance. On the main website, we’ll have a customized version of BuddyPress with groups, profiles, status updates, and activity streams to start, and courses, assignments, etc. later on. We also have a pretty extensive PBwiki site, and might possibly offer a hosted version of Etherpad.

The guide will offer a concise introduction to these tools, as there’s no use in reinventing the wheel. What I think is more important, though, is offering ideas of how the tools might be used and examples of related experiments at other universities.

For instance, students might use Etherpad to collaboratively take notes and share links during a class, and then publish those notes to the class blog at the end so that everyone has access to them for studying. Once published, those notes could be automatically pulled into the wiki page acting as the living course syllabus.

Other ideas that came to mind this morning:

• Students can write an introductory post at the beginning of the course detailing their background and what they hoped to learn in the coming semester. The class could use all of these to collaboratively develop the syllabus while also identifying the strengths and weaknesses of each human asset.
• Professor could post requirements for upcoming assignments and students can ask questions about it. The questions get answered once publicly, instead of a dozen times by email, and are stored in association with the assignment.
• Professors can use the blog to pull in learning materials from other sources and spark conversation on top of the content. Instead of duplicating efforts, they should focus on what they do best.
• Students can use the blog as an open research notebook, or for updates on a story in progress, and people both within the school and outside of the school can give feedback or offer suggestions.

Being able to point to examples, however, will be the secret sauce.

Howard Rheingold has a wiki for his Comm 182/183 classes that includes learning expectations, information on assignments, pages for each class session, and group project pages (behind an authentication wall).

Suzi Steffen’s J361 class uses a WordPress.com blog for posting assignment requirements, posting story ideas, posting updates on stories in progress (especially valuable: things learned along the way), posting completed assignments, and media analysis. They also use Twitter as a light-weight backchannel for the class:

Related to this, Clay Shirky held a public brainstorming session at the beginning of the year on designing college from scratch that generated several useful suggestions and is worth reading through for inspiration.

What ideas and examples are we missing?

What Seed Media Group should be doing, what every media group should be doing, is become a tech-oriented company (one of the reasons PLoS is successful is that it is essentially a technology-rich publishing company, with an incredible and visionary IT/Web team working with the editorial team in driving innovation).

Quite similar to what Michael Young of The Times said in March. You are not a newspaper, you are a news organization. You are not a media company, you are a technology company.

Alas, this is a project yet to be completed. The long-awaited iPhone 4 arrived a couple of weeks ago, and I wanted a functional solution right away. Thankfully, Flickr holds the same libertarian data portability views as I do. They also have a slick iPhone application where I can add metadata to my heart’s content.

Feel free to track my world in pictures.

An idea for the now: web application that OCR’s my grocery receipts to track my dietary habits over time while at the same time building a realtime database of food prices across the city. A bit like the Brian Lehrer project, but on a grander scale.

Even more exciting is that, with the new gig I started yesterday, I’ll be able to eat my own dog food and have a laboratory to play in to boot.

It feels wonderful to have my camera out again.

• TEAC stereo, 125 watt KLH subwoofer, two bookshelf speakers, and four floor speakers
• Matching dresser and night stand
• IKEA standing desk and chair
• IKEA futon mattress

If you know of anyone looking for home furniture in very good condition, I’d be willing to make a deal.

One thing I’ve observed: the market is absolutely flooded with second-hand furniture right now. I imagine this happens every June. I also know that it was nearly impossible to find the things I needed when I moved down here last August or September. This smells like a market opportunity to me.

The idea that came to mind immediately was a centralized solution: the enterprising entrepreneur would rent an empty house or storage unit, pick up all of the furniture on the market at depressed prices, store it for a couple of months, and then resell when the demand picks up again. I’d imagine that most items listed on Craigslist or on display at garage sales in June are discounted at least 50%, if not more. The biggest issue with this model, although, is that there are serious costs associated with moving the furniture twice, first to storage and then to the buyer’s home, that might well cancel out any margins.

There’s got to be a cleverer solution.

Super Analyzer is a nifty little Java app that will parse the contents of your iTunes library and then spit out statistics like song plays by album release year, library growth over time, most played artists and albums, and how often you play each album compared to the rating of the album. Furthermore, for each metric, you can break down the results by decade, genre, album and artist. For me, it’s all about the 2000′s.

Google News search result for “Apple”

New Orleans police action after Katrina

Ushahidi’s Github profile

What are the best methods for visualizing information over time, and how do you measure its effectiveness in telling a more complete story to the reader? To what degree should these tools be used for navigation versus presentation?

We’re rolling out Publish2 News Exchange to existing Publish2 users this week and, as always, journalists can register for free accounts.

Right off the bat, I’d like to say that the most awesome bit about the conversion script is its ease of use. Granted, you do have to run it on the command line and it does often throw mythical, unintelligible errors if your data is screwy, but it’s about 100 to 1,000 times easier than what Sean Blanda or Brian Schlansky had to go through. Furthermore, it spits out WordPress eXtended RSS files that WordPress imports natively. Depending on the size of your archives, you could even do the entire migration in less than a half hour.

There are detailed instructions in the README I encourage you to read thoroughly but, in screenshots, here’s how you’d migrate your site.

Backup your database using Sequel Pro. This is a critically important step, as you’ll definitely want a clean version to revert to if the import goes awry.

Place the conversion script and your archives in a folder you can access from the command line. Both College Publisher 4 and College Publisher 5 migrants should receive an articles file that will need to be renamed “stories.csv.” Publications migrating from the former will have all of their image references stored in a file that will need to be renamed “media.csv.” Navigate to that directory from your terminal prompt and run “python CoPress-Convert.py.”

Once the script is running, you’ll be asked a series of questions to configure the conversion process. Most options are self-explanatory, and all are explained fully in the README file packaged with the script. The most important thing I’d like to note in this post is that, unless you have less than 500 authors in your archives, I’d highly, highly recommend importing your authors as custom fields instead of users. WordPress is not optimized to add a large number of new users through its import process. We learned this the hard way migrating CM Life‘s database last summer.

When the script is done, you’ll have a series of WordPress eXtended RSS files you can easily upload into WordPress.

Mad props go to Miles Skorpen for the long hours he spent on the conversion script, and to Albert Sun, Will Davis, and Max Cutler for their later contributions.

Feel free to send along any suggestions for improvement, bugs, fixes or general comments. I intend to maintain it for the indefinite future, it’s good Python practice when everything else I’m working on is PHP, but code contributions are always welcome. There is a short list of upgrades under consideration in the top of the script.

Creativity tip: if you have a hankering for a massive salad, but don’t know what to put on it, go to the salad bar and make a list of everything available. Then, go to the veggie section of the grocery store, and buy everything on that list and then some. With luck, you should end up with a delicious mix of beets, baby corn, carrots, cucumber, chard, olives, peas, avocado, potatoes, and tofu.