Schmap is the latest of the web 2.0 technologies that heighten my connectivity on the Internet. One of my Creative Commons Flickr photos of Calgary’s Nose Hill Park was picked up by Schmap through Flickr’s powerful Search Engine Optimized tagging tools  – folksonomy for Flickr photo folks. We were planning a trip to the 12 Days of Christmas at Calgary’ Heritage Park. As I use Schmap to prepare for our outing this weekend, I feel somewhat like a 2.0 volunteer in my newly-adopted city.  

North Carolina-based Schmap has been operating since 2004 providing free digital travel guides for 200 destinations throughout the United States, Europe, Canada (with Calgary as one of its highlighted cities), Australia and New Zealand.

They also offer an innovative technology that lets bloggers insert schmapplets – a range of fully customizable map mashups and map widgets  on their personal blogs. I have tried to add the widget to Speechless but it didn’t work. Probably just as well as I am concerned that my WordPress blog is slow to open on machines that don’t have my images and files in cache.

I’ve also begun a list of key concepts on Flexlists which I prefer to call My Organic Glossary since it will mutate as my understanding of terms matures, deepens and develops through further teaching, learning and research.

I had attempted to use Babylon as an Open Source on-line build-your-own-glossary but realized that it is not actually free. It offers a limited introductory period followed by a pay-to-use plan. It would have been frustrating to invest time in building a glossary only to lose access to it!

I’ve started investing more time into my Google Customized Search on “Memory Work” and added Adsense. I have added refinements to it through labels: health, academic, article, museology, Inuit,

While reading my morning news via iGoogle .rss feeds, I came across the “Alberta Oil Blog, one of three blogs listed by the CBC Blog Watch² sidebar on its own September 25th article entitled “Albertans invited to give feedback on royalty review.”

Alberta Oil Blog describes itself as,

“Have you heard Alberta has oil a lot of it and people are getting rich, the environment is getting thrashed, the big city centers are growing too fast all because of the black gold. How long will it last? What will Calgary look like in 20 years? This blog will be about Alberta Oil and everything in between just as the title says.”

As I clicked backwards on various views of the Alberta Oil Blog including the source, I realized that this site does not reveal either its author or any link to an organization. It is a brand new blog that was just uploaded a few days ago, on September 22. However, it does have a healthy list of GoogleAds which link to oil industry jobs, investment news, etc. Each click is only worth a dime to the site author so the ads are not a direct link to instant wealth. The key words as listed in page source are oil sands, tar sands, alberta oil, calgary, oil rig jobs while the categories as listed on blog: Calgary, Ed.Stelmach, Environment, Fort.McMurray, Iran, Iraq, Oil, Oil.Sands, Our.Fair.Share.Report, Peak.Oil, Pipeline, Royalties, Stock Prices, Stocks, Suncor, Uncategorized, US.Imperialism, Videos, War, Wealth. CBC lists it as Alberta Oil Blog — Industry News, Information and Discussion, its source lists it as “News and information about the Alberta Oil industry.”

Is is because of computer-generated or author-generated synsets that the results take on an ironic postmodern schizophrenic feel combining Jon Stewart clips, Naomi Klein and anti-imperialism with advertisements for jobs on the tar sands and lucrative energy stock investments.

In the mythopoetic language of the aria Nessun Dorma from the Italian opera Turandot by Giacomo Puccini’s (1858-1924) the nameless prince seeks to enrapture the cold-hearted judge. Lew (1997) described the opera’s “underlying theme of the law: La legge è questa” which is “almost like a magic spell.” The Unknown Prince enters the contest and wins. But he wants something more authentic in his relationship with the princess than simply solving her riddles. The aria Nessun Dorma refers to a sleepless night through which his judge, the vinegar-souled princess, seeks to deprive the prince of his prize. He sings of a secret hidden within him, of dissolving the silence and finally of conquest. See Lew (1997).

Knox described how the Idol judge vinegar-souled Simon Cowell could not help smiling as he listened to Paul Potts’ rendition of  Nessun Dorma. His smile broke his face in half.

Journalist Jack Knox (2007) described 36-year old Welsh mobile-phone salesman, Paul Potts as the “classic underdog” looking like he “had been beaten all [his] life. ” Potts according to Knox was “poor, dumpy, shlumpy, overweight, slump-shouldered, with a gut-over-the-belt frame.”

The story of Paul Potts sharply contrasts with that of Joshua Bell, one of the world’s greatest violinists, who played his multimillion-dollar Stradivarius for spare change, incognito, outside a bustling Metro stop in Washington in a social science experiment. Commuters hurried by and only a rare few stopped to listen and were enraptured including one mesmerized very young child who tugged at his mother’s hand as she rushed to her next appointment (Weingarten 2007).

Location, location, location.

If Paul Potts had chosen to sing Nessun Dorma in that Metro stop in Washington in April 2007 would he have melted the hearts of vinegar-souled passersby? One thing is for sure, from now on, thanks to a combination of the popularity of Idol-style shows, Youtube and email if Potts were to sing for busy commuters he, unlike Joshua Bell would not go unnoticed.

to be continued . .

Notes

From Lew (1997).

The copyright for the Italian libretto of Turandot has been held by G. Ricordi & Co. since 1926 (Lew 1997). aria Nessun Dorma

Keywords

urban ethnography, moral mathematics, slow world, everyday.life, digg.com, digg story, youtube

Webliography

Flynn-Burhoe, Maureen. 2007. “Pearls before Breakfast: Story Dugg by papergirls.” >> papergirls. Uploaded May 16, 2007.

Knox, Jack. 2007. “Internet’s Idol’s Story Gives Hope to Us All.” Victoria, British Columbia: Times Colonist Sunday Edition. June 24, 2007. p. A3.

Lew, Mark D. 1997. “Turandot: Commentary on Symbolism, Poetry, and Nessun Dorma.” Last Updated September 29, 1999. Accessed June 24, 2007.

Weingarten, Gene. 2007. “Pearls Before Breakfast: Can one of the nation’s great musicians cut through the fog of a D.C. rush hour?” Washington Post. April 8. Page W10.

This slideshow Logo Digitage Web2.0 was featured on SlideShare on June 18!

Web 2.0, is a term coined by Tim O’Reilly in 2004 for a series of conferences on a revivified Internet. O’Reilly (2005) in what is now considered to be his seminal article claimed that, “If Netscape was the standard bearer for Web 1.0, Google is most certainly the standard bearer for Web 2.0 (O’Reilly 2005). He contrasted Web 1.0 with Web 2.0 by citing examples: DoubleClick vs Google AdSense, Ofoto vs Flickr, Britannica Online vs Wikipedia, personal websites vs blogging, domain name speculation vs search engine optimization, page views vs cost per click, publishing vs participation, content management systems vs wikis directories (taxonomy) vs tagging (”folksonomy”) and stickiness vs syndication. The conceptual map his team devised provides a sketch of Web 2.0 showing social networking sites, wikis, communication tools, and folksonomies.

Although some argue that it does not exist as anything more than geek jargon, for this new user, it is a promising and surprising paradigm shift in the Internet and in software development. I began blogging using Web 2.0 freeware in September 2006. Numerous users like myself have access to sophisticated, ever-improving software technologies since the cost of development is shared among enthusiastic nerds and geeks (in a good way). Freeware on Web 2.0 is not proprietary by nature but is capable of generating huge profits because of the viral way in which users share in the development, marketing and growth of the product while improving connectivity and in content in the process.

Note: June 2007. This image was included in Weinreich’s slideshare album with a layer of text he added:New Generation Social Marketing. He had to resize the image to the PowerPoint format. It is credited to me in the transcript. It is fascinating how digitage such as this has a potential for producing offshoots. I am investigating the potential of slideshare for managing teaching, learning and research digitage (slides) in one place. I started to put them in my Flickr albums. Since I first created this image I have begun to use YouTube, Google docs, iGoogle and Facebook so there are several layers of text orbits to be added . . .

Key words: slideshare, academic, blog, blogging, collaboration, presentation, web2.0, powerpoint, slides, sharing presentations, slideshare, academic, collaboration, presentation, web2.0, powerpoint, slides, sharing presentations, Tim O’Reilly, wordpress.com, vastation, synaptic gasp, swicki, synapses, synaptic cleft, synaptic gap, rapture of the deep internet, photoshop, neuroscience, neural architectonics, mind-brain, googleearth, gather, frimr, flickr, digitage, delicious, cybernarcosis, cyberdelirium, cyberdeliria, creative commons, consciousness, bricoleuse, blogspot, blogging, art and science, technology, mind, Adobe Photoshop

Selected webliography

Tim O’Reilly, 2005. “What Is Web 2.0: Design Patterns and Business Models for the Next Generation of Software”. Uploaded 09/30/2005. Accessed January 6, 2007.