Feeling experimental

Hi folks, having a slow day in December in Abu Dhabi. Weather is nice. Bobbi and I failed in our assault on the peak at Jebel Kawr a few days back (came to the realization that at our slow pace we hadn't allowed enough days) but we have 4 days later this month and we'll do it this next time. It's a challenging climb, but doable, and we're both young and confident. Meanwhile, I'm doing some armchair experiments.

First of all, I was looking for the free version of Camtasia 3.0 that Techsmith is offering. I came on this knowledge through the Webheads mailing list but have not been able to get my hands easily on retrieving the download information. For one thing, there is no announcement of this generous offer that can be easily found at the Techsmith site. Like, do they really want people to have this free software, or have they withdrawn their offer? A Google web search turns up some outdated sites from when version 3.0 was the most current, plus some software download sites offering 3.0 as a trial version still. What to do? Hey, it's new age ... what about a BLOG search? Yep, that works. Google blog search, magic.
http://blogsearch.google.com/blogsearch?hl=en&tab=yb&q=camtasia+3.0&btnG=Search+Blogs

The second thing, the real impetus for my experiment here, stems from an exploration of David Warlick's HitchHikr site. I have to admit I hadn't really understood it (and why there was no 'e' in Hitchhikr). I thought it was designed to aggregate all kinds of postings associated with conferences that designated conference tags. First, someone has to register this tag at Hitchhikr and then the scripts that David has placed here go out and troll for content. It turns out that the content as far as I can see derives from Flickr (NOW I get it). I'm not sure what else the site does, still twiddling with it. But being a bit of a hitchhikr myself (especially from travels in my youth) I decided to hitch on David's site by registering writingmatrix as a conference. I was both surprised and pleased to see that the result was photos that writingmatrix students (bloggers who tag their posts writingmatrix) have put up at flickr and tagged accordingly. I also saw that some of these writers/photographers have tagged their postings dekita as well. Not suprisingly, the photos take us on a tour of Sao Paolo.

Now for what I just discovered and the reason for this experiment. I have been having a devil of a time and no joy so far getting Technorati to aggregate my own blog postings. Others in the project seem to have no problem with this, but I, the esteemed coordinator, cannot seem to amass the correct authority or whatever Technorati is going on, to get my own posts to turn up in Technorati searches. I've tried everything I can think of. I've made my blog public, registered with Technorati, claimed my blog, pinged them innumerable times, and searched on posts with ANY authority. My blog posts never turn up, as they should do, here:
http://technorati.com/tag/writingmatrix?authority=n&language=en

By chance I came on a Technorati "Blog Tag Generator" at David's Hitchhikr site <http://hitchhikr.com/make_tags.php>, and that's what I want to try here. I entered three tags in the generator, hit submit, and was rewarded with the code appended here, which David says should be pasted at the bottom of my blog article, as is done here.

The last step, after publishing this post, is to ping Technorati, and David has supplied a facility for that in his BTG. So, let's see what happens ... will it work?? Stay tuned to find out.

(Can't wait ... fingers crossed ... checking the url above ... .. ..... . ? ..)

Technorati Tags: webheadsinaction writingmatrix dekita