Can you remember back to Kindergarden when you were taught to share toys? Well, today we are having a similar lesson only this one is about sharing the web. A recent popular trend is to share news articles, web pages, blog posts, and most anything interesting you can find on the web with friends, family, or co-workers. There are a few sites that specialize in this type of sharing. A new feature we've added to the Blogs is to easily share pages with these social networking websites. Dave developed this feature for Sitebuilder 3.0 and he adapted it to make it easy to use for the Blogs.

Using this feature is quite simple, it does require an account with  each social networking application you would like to use. Sharing a page with one of these applications simply involves going to the page you would like to share. Clicking "Share" and selecting the Application you would like to share the page through. Click on one (or all the applications) each one will prompt you to login if you are not already logged in. There may be some other options before the page is shared. But the hardest part is already done.

You may not want to use an application. That is ok, you can e-mail the link directly to a friend or co-worker. Click the "email" link and enter your recipients e-mail address and your done. Of course you can enter a personalized message if you like.

We hope you like the new features and use them to your hearts content!

We get a lot of questions about social media here at the Web Action Team headquarters, and not all of it comes from Bryon. The conversation usually revolves around someone in the division wondering if they should be on Facebook/Twitter/Blog/Delicious and other social networking sites. Most of the time, the answer depends on how much content the inquisitor produces and who the intended audience is.

Even though we may not always encourage users to jump on every new bandwagon, we are responsible for knowing what is out there, how it works and whether or not it would be appropriate to suggest. Cruising blogs and media reviews of new social media applications often requires trudging through tedious rants of excited users who proselytize the life-changing benefits of the applications.

That's what makes this little parody from The New Yorker so perfect. It pretty much nails the bombardment of buzzwords that ensues when social media devotees start discussing their cult(s).

Excerpt:

To start: Do you blog? If not, get in touch with Kris and Christopher from our online department, although at this point I think only Christopher is left. I’ll be out of the office from tomorrow until Monday, but when I get back I’ll ask him if he spoke to you. We use CopyBuoy via Hoster Broaster, because it streams really easily into a Plaxo/LinkedIn yak-fest meld. When you register, click “Endless,” and under “Contacts” just list everyone you’ve ever met. It would be great if you could post at least six hundred words every day until further notice.

If you already have a blog, make sure you spray-feed your URL in niblets open-face to the skein. We like Reddit bites (they’re better than Delicious), because they max out the wiki snarls of RSS feeds, which means less jamming at the Google scaffold. Then just Digg your uploads in a viral spiral to your social networks via an FB/MS interlink torrent. You may have gotten the blast e-mail from Jason Zepp, your acquiring editor, saying that people who do this sort of thing will go to Hell, but just ignore it.

Full Article

Every day our little server here at ANR Communication Services performs hundreds of "little" tasks automatically and without complaint. These are different from the usual tasks of a web server. These tasks range from simple items like sending out e-mails to more complex tasks like gathering data and processing it for immediate publication to a website. All of which work flawlessly except on rare occasions where a little intervention is needed.

Some of the data we gather every day comes from the most unlikely places. I'd like to highlight a couple of the services we provide from this data but probably more interesting is the journey of the information itself. Hold on to your hats as we head down the data trail! I'll do my best to keep this from being boring!

For many years now we've been collecting CIMIS data. This is basically hourly weather and temperature data from over 100 weather stations around California. The data itself is gathered from each weather station and stored in databases at CIMIS where the data is then downloaded and used for many diverse applications. Every morning we download the data, patch up any missing data, process it and push it out to the Fruit and Nut Weather related Models web site. Every morning we process over 17,000 individual pieces of temperature data multiple times. The data we download is the past 7 days worth of data. Every day that data is updated. We do this in case there were errors in the data coming from CIMIS. Take a look at some of the weather models. They may not make much sense if your not familiar with them but they are a huge help to farmers, particularly those with orchards.

We recently began gathering Fire Data from the US Forest Service. The name they have for this is MODIS Active Fire Mapping Program. The journey begins with 2 NASA EOS satellites Terra (launched 1999) and Aqua (2002). These satellites can be tracked through NASA's Satellite tracking. A word of Warning... It's hard finding the satellites in the list. From these satellites pictures are taken of the earth that show the earth's temperature. From the satellite photos, large fires can be determined from the "hot spots" in the images. US Forest Service collects information for fires in the US, Canada, and Hawaii only.
NASA recieves the data from the satellite. The data is then processed by NASA for hundreds of uses. Get surface temperatures, water temperatures, identify vegetation density, cloud density, and many more... One of them it to recognize "hot spots" and identify them as fires. The fires are then placed into a database for others to use. The US Forestry service takes this fire data and processes it for their own use. They name the fires and add detailed information such as who is fighting the fire and fire crews, containment, and so on. The data we download is only the fire locations. Unfortunately, the US Forest service keeps the name of the fires and other details in their own database. We receive the information in the form of GIS shape files all zipped up into one big zip file. These shape files must first be unzipped, then converted to text data so that we can put it into our database.

The image below was created by NASA from photo's taken from these satellites. The images are processed to show where vegetation is, where the burn area is, where the fire is still burning. There is a lot of potential uses for this for this data from public safety and awareness, to helping firefighters fight the fires, and more.

All of this is done so that we can provide you with the ANR Fire Map. Currently the map is very basic. It displays daily fires from all over the US, Canada, and Hawaii in a raw unprocessed format. We have data all the way back to December 1^st, 2000. My hope is to keep working on this map so that we can groups these individual points into fires, show the entire burn area, and show how they spread day by day. We are also working on other mapping applications. Repository items can be Geo-tagged, marking location by a point or an area, and their locations can be viewed in the Repository. Expect to see more ANR Maps in the future!

I call this the "Trickle Down Effect"; where information that cost thousands to billions of dollars to gather is organized and trickled down so that the even ANR Communication Services may freely use this information to serve the public. This is yet another example of some of the benefits we reap from things like the NASA space program, this and "Post-it Notes". However, "Post-it Notes" is a different story all together!

Don't forget to check out the ANR Fire Map!

Well, it's County Fair season...and since Cooperative Extension is involved with County Fairs I figured that it would be a good idea for the Web Action Team to go out to the fairgrounds and see what the heck it is that we support!

We started our trip to the fair with a quick awards ceremony.

Bryon was deemed a 'Super-Hero' because of some work he did programming the ANR Portal recently.  The Super-Hero award trophy was a jumbo corn dog.  Congrats Bryon. (Bryon- if you can explain what you did to win the award in fewer than 10 words, I'll buy you another corn dog, AND 3 tacos.)

After Bryon's corn dog extravaganza, we went over to the garden area to visit with our Yolo County Master Gardeners.  Every year they have a table set up to answer questions about plants, gardens, the MG program etc. etc.  They also have quite a few different displays as well as a small demonstration garden.  (This year's theme was 'Superheroes.'  Unfortunately they did not ask Bryon to take part.)

We wanted to introduce ourselves to the Master Gardeners, so we went up and started talking.   Getting them to understand who we are is tough- because many Master Gardeners  have no idea who/what ANR is- even though our logo is on many of the items they are handing out.  So our introduction took a while.  

I knew they finally understood who we were when one of the lovely ladies looked at Dave and said, "Oh, you're a Nerd."




Next stop on our trip was the Fruit and Vegetable building.  To me this is one of the more interesting parts of the fair, because it is where they display the freakishly large watermelon, butternut squash and 3 foot long carrots.

There were a LOT of posters from ANR programs.  VRIC, FNRIC and quite a few others had space.  We signed up for the Small Farms Program newsletter and we read all about County Extension in Yolo County.  

I wish ANR had the ability to put some staff in the building to answer questions because fairgoers don't seem like the poster reading type.  Yes- I volunteer to be the person that stands there next year. Or even this year- call me on my cell! (And by 'volunteer' I mean I would gladly do it while getting paid)





The rest of us were getting hungry by this time (even Bryon- because Super-Heroes cannot live on only a single corn dog) so we stopped to eat.  A longtime favorite food at the Yolo County Fair has been the pupusas.  We each ordered a plate of 2 pupusas, shredded cabbage and salsa.  I thought the habanero pupusa was the best, but other people were saying good things about the pork.




Even though this was a Web Action Team field trip, we brought along two members of IT- Damon and James.  (The IT people are the *real* computer geeks.  The Web Action Team are the stylish computer geeks.) The other two members of IT aren't available- but I hope they feel that they've missed out on something.  Maybe not something good, but something.



So that's it.  We spent a little more time together, but never made it over to the animals as a group.  Sorry 4H!  But the fair really is an interesting place to visit as part of ANR.  It's one way to see what we do in action...to see our programs interacting with the public...To hear old ladies call Dave a nerd...