Nominated Posts:
Week 5
Week 10
Week 11
Week 5
Week 10
Week 11
Having a blog for this unit has been eye-opening to me. I used to be shut off to any such “personal site” for the sole reason that I had little I wanted to share with the world at large. Now that has changed. From doing a blog every week, I’ve learnt that it can be a rewarding and useful exercise and that the internet is now a worldwide community where people can share any interesting thoughts, images, stories, movies, sounds and jokes with the world. In short, it has shown me the value of networked media to the world.
My blog functioned in much the same way as a journal, detailing what I was learning from this unit and the various sites and ideas we touched on in the lectures and tutorials. By making my own blog and observing what other people did with theirs, I saw how useful and interesting blogs can be. This unit has made me realize above all the marvels of “Web 2.0” - that most content on the internet is now user-generated. It also forced me to think deeper about and explore the subject matter of the course on an interactive level.
My production project B tied in with my blog and unfortunately (because of how late in the unit it was) was when I discovered how to embed in a blog post. Now that I’ve seen how to do that, I realize that I could have engaged an audience more with embedded content from other sites. I was amazed at the ease with which I could embed a relatively complicated map of images and text in an interactive form in my blog.
My blog has only one follower, but even that person has taught me the value of the web log as a type of networked media. By having her profile appear on my tumblog, I’ve seen how our unit can learn from each other’s work, making learning about networked media an interactive experience. I think the blogs we have all made should perhaps be a staple in other units. From writing my own blog and reading those of others, I was able to deeply engage in the unit, opening up to the possibilities of interactive technology through services such as Tumblr, Youtube, Flickr, MapaSet and many others. Our combined blog posts serve as a record of not only what has been taught in the unit, but each persons reflections and experiences while learning and doing projects. That is how my blog functions as an example of networked media.
Finally finished my Production Project. It took some figuring out how to put Flickr photos on Google, but I worked it out eventually.
I just watched the “Hitler as Downfall Producer” video on Youtube and besides being very funny, as the info tab explains, it “educates about intellectual property issues which is very clever. What is this? Education on the Internet that is funny and clever. I’d like to see more of this kind of video. I guess this is what to expect with “Web 2.0” - more intelligent user-created content (kind of). After reading the explanation I want to watch the other parodies and even “Downfall” itself.
I chose to do a geo-narrative for this assignment because I thought it was the most interesting option. I learnt more about APIs and mash-ups from my attempts at getting my work onto the internet.
My first step was to consider what I would photograph. Being unable to travel, I chose to do a photographic tour of Civic, the city centre. I looked at Flickr to see what other people had photographed around Civic. This gave me a few ideas and destinations to start with. Being a long time resident of Canberra, I already had a fair idea of what photos I would take.
The next step was to go out and actually take the pictures. There was more choice of things to use in Civic than I thought, and later I learned that I missed much of the interesting sculptures. Instead of being a specific tour of the art of Civic or its facilities, my project reflects my day in Civic, where I went and what I saw as well as some personal notes on my impressions after living in Canberra so long.
After taking the photos, I was faced with the challenge of how to present them. Initially I thought I knew what I was doing. I used Google maps to make a rough draft map of where my photographic tour had taken me. I used Photoshop to do this.
After I had made this, I used Flickr’s geo-tag system, which is a simple drag and drop process, to map the exact location of each photograph. From this project I have learnt a lot about geo-tagging and I am quite impressed with the compatibility of Google Maps with other sites that occurs because of clever use of APIs and mash-ups. I then added these photos into a set so that they could be recognised from my other Flickr photos.
I started having difficulty when I tried to actually present the photos. I was under the impression that Google Maps had a specific way to put Flickr photographs on a map. This was not the case. I went through a number of services, user scripts and mashups as well as Google Map specific “add-ons” before I found what I was looking for. I found a site called MapaSet which allows users to use a photograph set from their Flickr account to create a Google Map with only their photos shown. This was different from other services, most of which had several problems.
The main problem with most other Google Maps/Flickr mash-ups was that I was unable to save an interactive map with which I could present my photos. Fortunately, MapaSet allows users to embed a map on their site or in a blog.
My next problem was that most services did not show text related to the photo on the map. I knew that having this text would make my project a tour rather than a series of photos, so I searched until I found the right service. Even then, I noticed that MapaSet does not show details of the photos that accompany the Flickr images. Luckily, I found a way around this. I noticed that the title of a Flickr photo would show up on my MapaSet map and that if the title text of the photo was very long (ie a description of a place/sculpture on the tour) then MapaSet would show the description in place of a title. This was a very awkward way to have to enter text, but MapaSet was the only service I could find that presented the map in a way that it could be examined on one page.
Despite this awkwardness, MapaSet is a very easy to use service. I merely entered my Flickr username and selected my set of geo-tagged photos from the tour and the site showed them all on a map instantly. The map can then be customized by zooming and dragging the map to get the desired photos into the view of the map. The size of the map (width and height) can then be adjusted for a more inclusive or compact map.
Finally, I embedded my map onto my blog.
This week was uneventful on most fronts for me. Besides a trip this weekend to civic to work on my production assignment, nothing much happened.
It was very cool to see yoooouuuutube in action. I saw the name mentioned in posts in various places on the net, for a while but I only actually saw it in a tutorial this week. It reminds me of watching sounds play on a music editing program, all sorts of information going by each second. It must have taken a lot of effort to set that programming up.
This week I’ve been thinking about what to do for my Production Project B. I’ve decided that I’m going with option B, which is to make a geo-narrative. I’m unsure as yet about what I will do, but I’m putting a list of ideas down. I think a narrative of a story is a good idea. I’ll need to fit the context of the story into available images, which is going to be a challenge, especially using images of my own to tell the story.
I had a look at the Us Now site that was posted on Moodle. It looks very exciting. Without going overboard, it sounds like a new method of democracy… Large networks of people controlling large organisations sounds like a very different way of doing things. I am definitely watching that DVD when it comes out.
The “Twitter Literacy” article was another well thought out discussion of Twitter. I myself choose not to use Twitter (in fact, I’m one of the 60% of people who never returned after starting an account), but the example of the author requesting journalism tweets to follow and then receiving professional journalist’s replies sounds pretty amazing. It must be very easy now to find people with the same interests as you on Twitter, making it useful when used seriously. Maybe one day I’ll use Twitter for more than catching up on music news…
An interesting example of data visualisation and one that is easy to read is Pitch Interactive’s “Patterns in Oscar Movies”. The visualisation uses size and colour to show how many Oscars each genre in film has received.
Each genre is represented as a circle of a different colour and is arranged in a circular pattern next to the other genres. For each Oscar that a genre has won, the circle for that genre increases in size. This immediately and effectively shows the viewer which genres have not won any Oscars (a colourless, unfilled circle) and which have won Oscars, as well as the amount of Oscars won relative to other genres. The circular theme makes the visualisation aesthetically appealing and easy to read, adding to the interesting information that it presents, while the size aspect makes it easy to compare the amounts of Oscars for each genre.
This week I’d just like to reflect on the incredible leaps in technology that that have been achieved in such a short time. I recently re-read the reading for week 1, which was a WIRED article on the history of the net, and it has got me thinking about the present state of the web, let alone its future.
I am reminded every day of how life is enhanced by the internet. Of how incredibly easy is it to access information in this day and age. For example, in the past if I wanted to know the meaning of a word, I would have got up, walked over to a book shelf, picked out a dictionary and leafed through it until I found the word. Today, the process for me is as simple as pressing F9 and typing in a word. Even if I failed to find the definition using my computer’s dictionary, I could look the word up on wikipedia just as easily. I think this is amazing.
Like the article in WIRED mentions, the entire world of information -from the greatest minds of the past and present, to the nerdiest, most irrelevant facts- can be accessed by any person on earth who has a computer and internet connection. In fact, people with iPhones can access the internet. Call me boring for repeating this, but it is amazing. Information can be shared and people can talk to each other from the ends of the earth - few people from the past would even have thought it possible. It makes me imagine what the future will be like and how unpredictable and exciting it is, let alone the technology we have now.
This week we talked about the interesting possibilities of how technology could be used that would replace television, such as glasses that you wear which give you information on places, people and objects.
From the discussion, I saw two sides to such a device. On one hand, the convenience of having information with you all the time and the ability to be informed of e-mails, news and other important updates 24/7 would be beneficial. It would difficult to be lost or forgetful if you had up-to-date information all the time. On the other hand, it could be incredibly invasive.
Much like the internet, this service could become full of advertisements. Imagine walking down the street with ads right in front of your eyes. Or having someone “read” you with their headset - that is the potential for this kind of discrete technology. Interesting to think about and a good example of how we must think about technology even before it arises because it will inevitably affect our lives one way or another.
Another topic we talked about was the ability to have object-based media via RFI technology. I think this a really great idea. The best way I can see it being employed is having media such as digital newspapers on a small object that you can swipe with an iPhone to instantly download the media. I can see it being used in retail in the future. The only aspect of this technology which scares me would be if they tried to make a human being into a media object i.e. retina scanners/microchips. Not that worrying, but I would rather not be scanned constantly in the same way I would hate it if the media glasses mentioned above were to let people “read” each other the way you can scan people on the internet. Just because of the privacy invading it would entail.
This kind of thing reminds me how fast technology is advancing and how easily it can change everyday life in both positive ways and negative ways. It pays to stay up to date about new technology.
Not a lot happened this week for me. Most of the time I was focusing on my work, in particular Production project A. My work on that started with a hitch, but I sorted it out eventually.
It recently came to my attention that many people do not know about blogs or things like twitter. I didn’t before I started this blog, but I thought it was a conscious choice to ignore social networking as long as I could :). There is nothing bad about it. I just have never felt the need to talk to people online. Maybe if I had some interesting art work or music, then I would have a personal web log. It is relaxing sometimes to just know that your rant or insight ( :P ) can be read by anyone with internet access.
