Final Blog for the Semester

The truth is, I don’t think my blog was terribly successful. I think that the most views I had of my blog throughout the semester was around 26. My most popular day was the 13^th of May when I received 10 visits to my blog. I got a few comments and some weird spam comments, one from Satellite Direct TV.

I think that the main reason my blog didn’t have many visits may have been because of its content. We were meant to write about what had been happening in our tutes and what we were learning about in our lectures that current week. This was sort of a restricting topic for me and I usually had trouble going into to much detail about the things we had been learning about. A lot of the other blogs by the students in the course were all on similar topics to mine and I have to admit that I think my own blogs were not as well written as some of the other students blogs were.

If we had of been able to write blogs about what ever the hell we wanted, I definitely could of made mine a lot more interesting and may of even had the motivation to write more then one blog a week. I think if we had have been given this freedom, visiting the other student’s blogs would have been pretty fun. Instead of flicking through countless pages of people summing up what had happened in that week, there would have been a large variety of topics and it would have been interesting to see what each person had written about. Seeing lots of different peoples thoughts, opinions and responses come together in a big pool would have been a good example of networked media.

Here are the titles of the top three blogs I have chosen for assessment:  Datavisualization, Photosynth and Social Networking.

Rational for Project B

For production B, I went with the geo-narrative, which was the second of the two options. I chose doing the geo-narrative over the data visualisation because I thought the end result would look better. Generally I think data visualisations are a lot more impressive then geo-narratives when they are done professionally, but considering the fact I am a first year uni student, I didn’t think that I could make one that would live up to the examples we have been looking at in the lectures and the tutorials.

My geo-narrative is fictional story. The actual concept for my story is a joke. I found it sort of difficult to make the brief descriptions of events humorous because of a text limit for the boxes and I also wanted to keep each scene description as brief as possible, so I just gave all the characters ridiculous names, like Greasy Dean.

The geo-narrative is a spoof of your generic crime drama and follows the events of a thug for hire, named Allen, who has just come down of a crystal-meth bender and wants to get a bit of weed to chill him out a little. Allen goes to great lengths to get some weed and nearly every character in the story dies by the end. The city the story is set in is called Shitsvill, even thought it’s just a map of Canberra. I chose the name Shitsvill because the town the story’s set in is simply meant to be a shit hole.

I started by writing up the scenes on paper and figured out the plot of the story. Then I drew up a quick story bored and with the help of a few of my friends, I drove around a few suburbs taking the photos to match each scene. For the shots where someone is dead or being killed, I just scribbled red blotches on them in photo shop.

For each scene I took several different photos, originally intending for them all to be used for the final project. When it came to placing the markers however, I ended up using only half of the photos. If I went into too much detail for each scene the area in which it happens would be crowded with markers. Even the end result looks a bit crowded if it is not zoomed in far enough, which is a bit annoying.

Mapping out the story wasn’t too hard but it was time consuming and it was a bit tedious having to scroll around the map placing the markers. With all the text, I typed it up on word and just cut and past it once I’d checked it for spelling, although there still is probably some mistakes, which I’ve over looked.

One thing I had a problem with was uploading the pictures to the markers. According to a little help manual thing on Google maps, all the photos have to be hosted on a website before they can be used and you cant just cut and paste it out of Photoshop. I tried to upload all my images to Flickr but that didn’t work either. In the end I used Google Picasa Web. From there I could make an album and easily pasted the URL for each image into the markers.

Once the photos were down the geo-narrative looked a lot better, and I’m pretty happy with the end result. Each scene is numbered so that it is easy to follow the story in the correct order. The link to the geo-narrative is to the right on the blog roll and in case that doesn’t work you can just cut and paste the following:

http://maps.google.com.au/maps/ms?hl=en&gl=au&ie=UTF8&oe=UTF8&msa=0&msid=116558423750065297337.000485e464f4c1a43b873&ll=-35.266523,149.148781&spn=0.012106,0.01826&t=h&z=16

?

The assignment is due next week and I’ve only just come up with an idea, but that’s a start. I’m going with the geo-narrative idea for it and have decided to map out a fictional story throughout Canberra. My story will be along the lines of some generic crime drama only this one won’t be serious. Some of the characters names for instance, are just dumb. The Smegman and Greasy Dean are two of the characters that will be in my story.

The main characters name is Allen and you’ll be able to follow him across the city known as Shitsvill (which is actually just Canberra)as he comes down of his three day crystal meth bender and is in search of a bit of weed to take the edge off. Allen goes to great lengths just to get a joint and he becomes involved in the cover up of a political assassination and ends up being the number one most wanted man in the city.I decided to use Canberra as the city my story’s set because I can spend a few hours driving around taking the photos of where it’s actually tagged on Google maps.

No More Lectures

Now that lectures have finished I don’t think my blogs are going to be as interesting, but then again they were pretty shit in the first place. I’m going to struggle to think about what to say for the rest of the semester but guess I’ll start by talking about the last assignment. We can choose between building a data visualisation and creating a geo-narrative. I was originally thinking about doing a data visualisation but had no ideas what so ever, plus I wasn’t really sure what a geo-narrative was. But yesterday in the tute we looked into what a geo-narrative actually was, I’m sure Michael mentioned it in the lecture but I can only stay focused for so long. I guess I’ll make up some bullshit story and map it out as it goes. I still haven’t got any real ideas yet but I think I can feel something good brewing in my head. That’s about all I can think of saying for this weeks blog so… cya?

Datavisualization

This week’s lecture was our last for this semester and the topic was datavisualisation, which is the visual representation of data, information which has been abstracted in some schematic form.

According to the freelancing web designer, Vitaly Friedman: “The main goal of data visualization is to communicate information clearly and effectively through graphical means. It doesn’t mean that data visualization needs to look boring to be functional or extremely sophisticated to look beautiful. To convey ideas effectively, both aesthetic form and functionality need to go hand in hand, providing insights into a rather sparse and complex data set by communicating its key-aspects in a more intuitive way. Yet designers often fail to achieve a balance between design and function, creating gorgeous data visualizations which fail to serve their main purpose — to communicate information”.

In the tute for this week we looked at websites that fell into the category of datavisualisation. The one I looked at was called Digg Labs. This website is connected with Digg.com which is a social news site. On Digg.com users post stories and links to things happening around the world and on the internet. People read the stories and if they like it the have the option to press a button labelled Digg, which has a little thumbs up next to it. The more popular the story is the more Digg’s it’ll get and so the most popular stories of the day will be the ones posted on the main page of Digg.com.

Digg Labs consists of six graphs that show specific information about popularity of stories and other things along those lines. The first is 365 which shows the top ten stories on any day, month and year. The second called Pics tracks the activity of images on the site. The third, Arc displays stories, topics and containers wrapped around an arc. The fourth, BigSpy, places stories at the top of the screen as they are Dugg, as new stories are Dugg old ones move down the list. The fifth which is called Swarm draws a circle for stories as they’re Dugg, Diggers swarm around stories and make them grow.

The sixth graph and the one I found most interesting was Stack. It’s presented in the form of a collum graph. It occurs in real time showing Diggs as they happen. When a story is Dugg a small block falls from the top and lands on top of the story it was for making that individual collum larger. Along the bottom there is also a smaller version of the BigSpy where stories are constantly coming up and being pushed down depending on their popularity. You can choose a story via its collum and it brings up a screen showing you the number of Diggs the story has received, the time it was put up and a link to the actual website so you can read the story for itself.

I found the website very interesting and it gave me some good ideas for the up coming assignment, although I don’t think there will be anyway my assignment will be as good as Digg Labs.

Photosynth

This week’s lecture was about multiplicity. We looked at the power of vast numbers on the internet and what increasing groups of things are capable of. One video we watched in the lecture was of a new software application by Microsoft called Photosynth. This is where multiple pictures of the same area are matched together and generates a three-dimensional model of the photos and a point cloud of a photographed object.

Photosynth technology works in two steps. The first involves the analysis of multiple photos taken of the same area. This process identifies specific features in a photo and then it is compared and matched to the same identified features in other the photos. By analysing the location of matching features with in each photo, the program can identify the 3D position of each feature in the photo as well as the position and angle each photo was taken. The second step involves the display and navigation through the 3D point cloud of images. This is with the downloadable photosynth viewer. It uses technology from the Seadragon program to zoom through high resolution photos without the user having to download them to their machine.

The man who spoke on the video about photosynth talked about how it could use Flickr as the source of photos and create detailed 3D models of the selected location. If the thousand people who visited these locations were to upload just one photo each, there would be a vast collection of images which could be used to create these 3D models.

Social Networking

This week in the lecture Michael Honey spoke about social media. This is YouTube, Flickr, Facebook and all that other stuff. What I found most interesting was the progression of Facebook from a small social network at a university to the largest social networking website in the world in the space of just four years. We looked at a graph on Google trends and compared Facebook and MySpace and how they’ve grown since they were both created. Facebook dropped its pants and shat all over Myspace. Around mid 2007 they became equally as popular and by 2008 Facebook shot high above Myspace in user numbers. Today over 400 million people are using Facebook. If Facebook were a country it would be one of the largest in the world and they’d probably have nuclear weapons which they would use to whip out any other countries that stood in their way of ruling the world. Almost definitely.

Looks like there’s a but load of cash in this whole social networking thing, so my plan is to follow some of the geeky guys who run Facebook home and mug them. I figure that as long as I’m careful about it and change my mugging times and dates often, I should be able to keep it up for a good two years and live off the money I take from Mark Zuckerberg’s pocket and in two years there will probably be a bigger and better social networking site so I can start mugging that chump.

I Don’t Know What To Say

 I’m not sure if we were meant to do a post for our week off but even though it’s actually Monday and I have nothing to write about because we had no lecture ill do one anyway, just in case. I submitted my html which went alright and my rational is my post for last week. I didn’t do much homework during my week off because I’m a lazy bastard and that’s about all I can think about writing for this week. Sorry.

Rationale For Assignment 1

For project A, I chose to do the first of the two options for the assignment. This was where I had to create an online exhibition in a medium of my choice. I was originally thinking of doing a movie review site, but I was put off by the fact that a few other students were doing something quite similar. Instead I decided to make an amusing website with the theme of a war on cephalopods. The idea came to me from a reoccurring joke I have with a few of my friends, the joke being that squids and cuttlefish were eventually going to come out of the sea and whip out the human race. The website I’ve made consists of individual profiles on squids, octopuses, nautiluses and cuttlefish, a collection of photos that relate to the theme of a cephalopod invasion and a stream of cuttlefish photos from flicker.

I used the program Wordwrangler to write up the html and css for my website. I started by putting on the html and body tags, which are necessary in writing an html. The html tag is what is defines it as an html and the body tag is what contains all the contents of the website. Then, using the head tag, I wrote the header of the page, which is The War On Cephalopods. I put it in a div tag with the id of header. In the css I put a box around the title with a blue background, the hex code being #82CFFD. I made font size at 50px and the font family Wide Latin.

Bellow that is my first body of text. I put that text in a div tag with the id of text1. I put that text in the same blue box as the header and I went with the default text size. In this body of text, I talk about my deluded theory of the cephalopods planning to whip out man kind and I’ve put in four links that take you to other pages I’ve made on my website. There is one for the nautilus, the cuttlefish, the octopus and the squid. I made these sperate pages by writing four smaller html pages. I’ve linked them to the same css so the titles and text have the same look. I used the tag a href on small bold header for each animal. They take you to the small profiles on the separate pages which I’ve written. Each of the pages also includes a picture of the animals, except for cuttlefish where I’ve put in a picture of Cthulhu. I used the image source tag to get these of the internet but a few were too large for the page so I shrunk them in photo shop and saved the photo in the same folder where my all my html pages were saved. I’ve put these images in div tags with the same id so I could centre them easily.

Bellow the main text is a video from Youtube of some Japanese fisher man catching a giant squid and a small collection of images with text captions bellow them. All of text and images are in div tags so that they can be aligned in the centre and so the text is easier to read. At the bottom of the page is a stream of cuttlefish pictures from Flickr, which I got using Yahoo pipes. There is also a link to my blog. I made the body background image of a blue ocean that fits the theme of cephalopods.  

Like I said above, I used the programme Wordwrangler to write my html, but I did try using Dreamweaver at one stage. I found Wordwrangler to be quite easy to use, with large text making it easy to read. The screen in which the html was written in Dreamweaver seemed considerably smaller but that programme does give suggestion of the tags which you are typing at the time, which could save a lot of time. I had nearly finished by the time I tried Dreamweaver, so I stuck with Wordwrangler, but in future I will try using another programme. Dreamweaver seemed to be quite user friendly and I think that it also gives the option to view your progress without having to open up your html with safari, internet explore or firefox. Although my website looks very amateur compared to common ones found on the internet, I was quite happy with the end result considering this was the first html I’ve ever written.

Mighty Fine Progress

Earlier this week I spent ages in one siting working on my html. Now my webpage RULES. Nah, it’s still pretty shit but compared to how it looked before my html sesh earlier this week, it’s a lot better. I set a background image of some ocean water and just by doing that, it looked a lot more visually appealing. My previous background was just some filthy purple with the text in a box that was a bowl moving red. Now the text is in a blue box on top of a blue ocean background and it looks alright.

I made four little link things which open up to other pages I have made. On these pages I rambled bullshit about squids, octopuses, nautiluses and cuttlefish and at the bottom of the page I put this badass little home button which takes you back to the main page.

On the main page bellow those links I just mentioned I’ve put in a Youtube video of some Japanese fisherman catching a giant squid and a bunch if weird octopus and squid pictures. At the bottom of the page, using yahoo pipes, I’ve got this little slide show thing going on, where I’m constantly getting pictures of cuttlefish off flickr.

Sorry if this blog is poorly written, the truth is I’m hung over as shit. I went to Transit Bar last night for my friends bands EP launch, had a few beers, which led to a which led to a few more beers, which then led to a lot more beers. I was almost not going to do any homework today, but Friday is my day off so it’s become my major homework day. Maybe next week my blog will be better. Maybe…