Moving at the Speed of Creativity

I have absolutely LOVED using Juice Receiver along with PodNova and iTunes to manage my podcast subscriptions the past several years. Unfortunately, the developers of Juice Receiver appear to have discontinued updates, and the available version (2.2) for Macintosh OS X runs VERRRYYYY slowly and sometimes (at least for me) doesn’t run at all. I usually run Juice Receiver every week or so to update my podcast channel subscriptions, and have noticed for several months that Juice runs very slow. (I keep my primary iTunes library on an external hard drive, so this updating process requires a bit more inconvenience because of this.) For some reason this evening, however, Juice will not run an update. It launches fine, but locks up when I click the update button. My computer shows that Python maxes out the CPU cycles on my MacBook, and I really can’t do anything until I force quit the application. The graphic below shows my CPU usage history (with iStat) just after I force quit Juice Receiver. You can see the cycles were just maxed out before this screenshot was captured with Skitch:

Since I maintain my podcast channels on PodNova and PodNova permits the downloading of an OPML file of podcast subscriptions, I decided to download the OPML and then import the podcast channels included in it directly into iTunes. Initially I had trouble with this because PodNova wanted to append the extention “.xml” to the OPML file, and iTunes didn’t like that. When I chose FILE - IMPORT within iTunes, I could select the opml.xml file created by PodNova, but iTunes wouldn’t import anything.

To troubleshoot this, I subscribed to a couple podcasts via the podcast directory in iTunes, and then exported that OPML file from iTunes to the desktop to see if I could identify a difference between the OPML file syntax which iTunes likes versus the OPML file syntax of PodNova using TextWrangler. Fortunately, I didn’t have to even look “inside” the OPML file and make any changes– the difference was the file extension! iTunes apparently requires OPML files have the extension “.opml” to import them as podcast channels. Once I changed the extension, whoa-la! All 44 channels directly imported into iTunes!

It is entirely possible I have a misconfiguration or a corrupt file on my system which is causing Juice Receiver to malfunction on my Macbook running OS 10.5.2. I have actually ordered a new laptop hard drive and plan to soon reinstall my OS and all my applications– At that time I’ll give Juice Receiver another try. For now, however, it looks like I’ll have to settle for using iTunes to manage my podcast channel subscriptions. The main feature of Juice Receiver I’ll miss is the “clean up” feature, which I detailed in my January video podcast “Cleaning Up Downloaded Podcasts with Juice Receiver.”

Is anyone else continuing to use Juice Receiver on a Macintosh computer with iTunes, running the latest operating system? I’m hopeful I’ll be able to return to Juice Receiver at some point in the not too distant future.

Technorati Tags:
podnova, juice, itunes, podcast, subscribe

I updated my scheduled presentations and workshops for the month of May on my RSS Calendar recently. (The next 30 days of events are shown on my blog in the left sidebar.) One of the sessions I’m looking forward to is a May 12th workshop presentation for the Oklahoma Library Association at the public library in Midwest City. The overall workshop is titled “Safety on the Internet Highway.” My first session in the afternoon is titled “Beyond the Fear Factor.” Given the fact I’ll be following Joel Gabel of Google Hardware Operations and Larry Boggess of the Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation’s Internet Crimes Division, this is sure to be challenging! I am very glad to have this opportunity, however, and think it is GREAT for the Oklahoma Library Association to have put together a mixed panel on this very important topic.

My second afternoon session for May 12th is titled “Educating [Library] Customers & Legislators about the benefits vs. dangers of online networking.” This presentation will focus on digital citizenship and the pivotal role which librarians ARE playing and can play in larger conversations than simply “Internet Safety.” These include media literacy and 21st century workforce skill development.
If you are interested in learning more about digital citizenship, check out ISTE’s scheduled webinar by Dr. Mike Ribble on May 7th, in just two days. Dr. Ribble and Dr. Mike Bailey are the authors of an ISTE published book on digital citizenship, and maintain the KSU College of Education website on digital citizenship which continues to be the first Google search result for “digital citizenship” out of over 250,000 hits. Dr. Ribble’s personal website on digital citizenship is available on www.digitalcitizenship.net, but his blog there has not been updated since November of 2007.

My bookmarks related to digital citizenship are available both on Diigo and del.icio.us (where my Diigo bookmarks automatically cross-post.)  I’ve created a new group on Diigo for digital citizenship: You are welcome to join and contribute links! I’m particularly interested in finding examples of libraries and library organizations which are actively helping students safely utilize social networking environments as suggested in the summer 2007 NSBA report “Creating and Connecting.” YALSA (the Young Adult Library Services Association) is definitely one library organization which continues to embrace new media communication possibilities via its blog, wiki, Twitter account, Flickr pics, del.icio.us social bookmarks, and MySpace page.

Are you aware of other examples of library organizations and libraries focused on supporting the development of digital literacy skills for their patrons, both young and old? If you’re willing to share links, please add them here as comments and/or join the Digital Citizenship Diigo group and add them there.

• skydaddy - Stickam
  Corey Burgeron from Ohio’s Skickam’s page
  (tags: webvideo collaboration video distributedlearning)
• Doodle
  website for scheduling meetings by creating a poll
  (tags: calendar schedule meeting collaboration web2.0)
• Stickam - The Live Community
  Similar to Ustream, but this site permits multiple people ot use their webcams for live webcasts
  (tags: webcam webcast webcasting collaboration video webvideo)
• Hannah Montana star Miley Cyrus apologises for Vanity Fair shoot - Telegraph
  29 Apr 2008 - Good grief. More “in your face” reasons why it is a bad idea to have TV or movie actress role models
  (tags: disney digitaldialog parenting ethics)

This evening I took some time to review the ClustrMaps for my blog over the course of the past month (April 2008.) ClustrMaps is a wonderful website which provides code people can insert onto their blog or other website to track (by IP address) the general locations of people who are accessing and viewing content on that particular website. As I have remarked previously, these visual representations of readership continue to absolutely astound me! The Pitcairn Islands ClustrMap Mystery continues, however. I would love to know who my reader(s) are on the Pitcairn Islands, or on the other south Pacific island which is showing up on my ClustrMap again! The April 2008 ClustrMaps show visitors to my blog from almost 25,000 different locations worldwide. This is a clear sign of the times. We’re not living in 20th century Kansas anymore.

Hello to Sue Waters in Perth! I can see your city on the ClustrMap image above! But who is making that access dot in Alice Springs?!

What I’d really love to do is arrange to travel IN PERSON to all these locations around the world, along with members of my family. Planning an international education, learning, or educational technology conference in 2008-2009? Please consider me as a possible keynote speaker and drop me a line! I was able to take my son to COSN this past March in Washington DC, but I’m sure he’d flip if at some point he could accompany me to Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, or another location which seems quite exotic to us living here in central Oklahoma!

Technorati Tags:
clustrmap, blog, readership

I spent a delightful weekend offline the past two days at the Mo-Ranch Conference Center near Hunt, Texas. I really enjoyed the men’s conference, and had an opportunity to share a presentation on Internet Safety and Social Networking with a different audience than “normal” for me on Saturday. Most of the attendees were retired grandparents. The most surprising as well as sad thing I learned from my workshop participants was that my warning for young girls to NEVER allow anyone to take a photograph of them without clothes on (because, as the Ad Council video “Think Before You Post” illustrates, there is no way to control or limit distribution of a digital image) was shared too late for the granddaughter of one of the attendees. Not realizing the images could and likely would be shared with people all over her school community, the girl and one of her friends had recently agreed to let a boyfriend take some compromising photos of them. It was difficult to have to tell the girl’s grandfather this weekend there is really no way to completely “take back” or destroy digital images which have been widely published online and distributed via cell phone multimedia messaging to others.

One of my workshop participants also told me about last week’s hoopla (which continues) over Miley Cyrus’s recent racey photo shoot. Hopefully this incident will have a positive outcome, if more young people discuss the dangers and undesirability of having compromising digital photos of themselves circulated around a local or global digital audience.

My session at the men’s conference was entitled “Internet Safety and Digital Dialog.” Both these incidents highlight the continuing need we have for “digital dialog,” which I define as open and regular communication between parents and children (as well as with others) about issues related to digital media and communication technologies.

Technorati Tags:
socialnetworking, photos, mileycyrus, safety, digitaldialog, parenting, moranch, conference