The end. (Meta Post)

I'll start off with getting what i think to be my best 3 blog posts:
The Internet is awesome
DATAVIZZZ
WEB 2.0

I guess why these three are the best of my blog posts is because the content in which they are talking about, is something that i learnt, found really cool or just generally useful and will incorporate into my daily web browsing. But overall i really enjoyed the unit nd learned a lot of new things, and also new appreciations of the internet and its capabilities.

But if you do look at my blog as a whole, you could perceive it as being negative, and yeah i guess it kinda does look like that, but thats due to my dislike of writing code in any fashion. Kinda like maths, i rather give the answer then show working. And don't think that i don't appreciate what something like a cascading style sheet aims to do, i think that its a great tool that can really help programmers, but again, not interesting in the programming side.

Now moving onto the whole 'traffic' thing.

If you were wanting to get a message to a large audience of people relatively cheap, then the internet is a great way to do that! Advertising and linking back to your site will get large volumes of traffic in. This is what we like to refer as "networking" (see what i did there?). and if you do this, lots of people will take note of what you are saying. But that is just one form of networking. If you are a person who likes cats in hats, and you stumble accross this great high traffic site called flickr, and discover that other people want to posts pctures of their cats in hats, you would be in heaven!!! But rather then go through each photo one by one, why not somehow have the ability to source all the photos via tags or headings "cats with hats", and have them present themself on a single page. API's are a great way of networking and sourcing multiple things without having to find them individually. But in reference to our blog posts, my aim wasn't to distribute our thoughts to a large audience, but rather use these blogging sites as a weekly journal on our activites in class. Which is another way that the internet can be used.

So the internet is a great tool which can be used in a variety of manners. So if your aim is to network to other sites in a variety of mediums, then the internet can help you achieve that. But if you don't want millions of people reading up on what you did in class the other day, then chances are, they won't.

Rationale

Geo-narrative:


View The cure in a larger map

I originally started with the dataviz, and came up with some really good ideas. Such as, what if i could show that countries with high amount of cigarettes consumed per capita, was also related to a shower life span. Another idea was to have calories consumed and amount of water consumed over a week, to try and show that during the week, people are generally healthier, then when the weekend rolls around, people get drunk and healthy eating habbits go out the door. But i ran into the problem of either the data i got was conflicting, didn't lead to a conclusion or i just couldn't find it. So I decided to go with the geo-narrative.

I found the geo-narrative a lot easier to compile information and see where I was going with it. I came up with a story, noted down photos that could be used and what i needed to take photos of, and off i went. Probably the hardest part of this assignment was getting in contact with people on flickr, asking them if it was alright if i used their images for a non commercial university assignment... i sent 4 requests, and received none back. It wasn't nessacarily that the users didn't log into flickr, but were probably unaware that they have received a message from me, (or they just ignored my requests). But after looking around a bit more, I discovered the 'advanced search' option, which revealed that i could search for images with a Creative Commons Licence. This was a great tool to use as I could use the image, without having to contact the owner, and already know under what conditions i could use this image. All of the images i got from Flickr required that i not use it in a commercial environment, and that i simply referenced them. And so I did. In the geo-narrative, you will see that under certain images, there is a link to the owners Flickr page, (or the specific image).

Also in the cultural context of this, I know other people found it difficult to find other geo-narratives, and I also found the same. I guess it is a new concept, and In this 'story telling form' I don't think it will really catch on, unless its in a "this is where i went and here's a picture".

So at the end of the day, the use of creative commons saved me a lot of trouble, and i praise the people who invented it.

I also thought i might embed the map into my blog post, to try and show another example of networked media. But if you do need the larger version, there is a link under the map.

DATAVIZZZ

Dataviz, also know as datavisualization and da7avI5u4L1z4710n, is cool. It makes data look cool and interesting, i seriously think that the ABS needs to invest in some of this stuff. But then again the government (or lollerment as i call them) is pretty boring, and wouldn't expect them to do anything cool. It was also interesting to see how data can be displayed, not only was it through bar graphs, but other cool things like that old school datviz that had mountains, rivers and waterfalls. Pretty intense.

And lastly, thanks for the awesome lectures mike. Best lectures evar. As a thanks, i give you this:

Multiplicity - Our Idea

So to come up with an idea of collective intelligence, we thought what could make gathering and distributing and making access to information easily. So we thought about the Australian census. The census it still in paper form, and we thought that if it was also available online, that it would be easier to gather, compile and distribute/make that information easily accessable.

web 2.0

I knew about web 2.0, and that it was the french revolution of the internet, but i never knew that there was a specific idea/concept behind it. I previously thought that web 2.0 was basically just a upgraded shiny version of the interwebs, but now its more about 'collective intelligence', which is cool.

Rationale.

Networked Media Production – Project A Question 2: A Rationale...

R18+ Australia

I chose to make a reference page or site to present the current affairs topic of R18+ video games in Australia. I felt that this was a good opportunity to present a topic that is very relevant to myself (being an avid gamer), but also find out more information about the topic and properly inform other people.

The reason why I created a website is that most people that would be interested in this topic are very computer literate, they would be looking on the internet for information about this topic and that I felt a webpage was the best vehicle to reach my target market.

I initially started looking at other websites not only for information, but layout styles, how up to date they were, general content, colour scheme and basically how easy they are to navigate. In my searches I found a lot of content that was more or less people ranting about why there isn’t an R18+ classification for video games, and news articles about games that have recently been banned. Although it wasn’t particularly hard to find good informing webpage’s about the topic, it did actually require you to go past page 1 in a Google search. I eventually did find multiple pages that ranged from helpful and informing to average to poor. But I will concentrate on three specific websites:

· http://everyoneplays.org.au/ A website set up by retailer Game which is a very informing website, easy to navigate and generally aesthetically pleasing. It contains a brief but informative ‘about’ section and is generally geared towards encouraging people to sign a petition to support the proposed R18+ classification.

· http://www.r18games.com.au/ This is the website where I spent a lot of my time reading and gathering information. It contains more in depth information about the topic and was fairly easy to navigate. It has very up to date news, the colour scheme works well. Once again this website is less about reporting and more subjective. Main criticism is that the pages are overfilled with text.

· http://www.r18gamesaustralia.com/ This website is a blog that has been created in wordpress. It mostly contains news updates and a very brief ‘about’ section that isn’t particularly informing. The layout of the site is very ‘bloggy’ and the navigation bar was a bit hard to find. This website is very one sided, it almost felt like the creator was trying to recruit followers for a cause. Felt like a bit of a propaganda campaign.

When looking at these websites I thought that they were for the most part really good. They had a simple but effective layout, easy to read, easy to navigate, very aesthetically pleasing and the colour scheme didn’t conflict. Although most of these attributes were shared across the board, there was another attribute that these websites had in common. Subjectivity. They were all less about informing, and more about a call to arms via signing a petition. So I felt the need to produce an informing website that wasn’t biased and contained useful information about Australia’s current situation regarding R18+ video games, what had been banned in the past, recent news updates, how someone could help and if we do release R18+ rated video games, how we will stop underage gamers from getting their hands on these games.

So I set out to create a reference page/site. I chose to do a webpage format not dissimilar to that found on the http://everyoneplays.org.au/ and http://www.r18games.com.au/ websites. Their layouts worked really well and I wanted to incorporate that into my site. The only main modification I made from those layouts was to have a navigation bar on the top left hand side of the page, were it was obvious and couldn’t be lost. But the main thing I wanted which none of the other websites had was unbiased content. I wanted to inform rather than argue one side of an argument.

I made the site using Dreamweaver, I have used it before and it was really great being able to modify code and play with the design side of things. The only downside was that for some reason it kept on throwing the frames out of position, and no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t get them to stay still. I thought that I networked to other media quite well; I included websites as a source of news and recent developments, and also a youtube video from the ABC which would help the viewer build their own picture and view on this subject.

philosophy?

this weeks lecture was interesting, it had a lot of philosophy stuff in it, and to be honest, it was kinda interesting. I have never ever done any philosophy stuff before, but since coming to uni, it seems to be apart of most subjects i'm doing. This isn't a bad thing, but like i said i have never done any of this stuff before, and I never thought i would see myself saying that philosophy is interesting.