Week 15- 'Meta' post

When I look back and consider the content of my blog it seems to me that I have used in an almost too formal matter. The language I find is very aware that my tutor and lecturers will be reading this and to a certain capacity this will be up for assessment. I feel that this awareness may have hindered my personality. But however I see this as a learning curve and it has been nice to re-read my weekly blogs it seems as though almost everything in the lecture was 'cool'. Although thinking about it now I can see myself letting go of this formal tone next time around. I would really like to just have a carefree vibe to the language and post on just chuck in posts on music that I really like or movies that I'm pumped to see that sort of thing. The content of my blog I thought was reasonably good as it really just gave my insight into the content in the lectures. Though I think I may have played it safe, trying to write long blogs also kept me from just posting anything I saw.

It seems my audience was bigger than Sharon and Michael. I was able to find three followers (thank you guys!) before I was content to no longer wallow is blogging self doubt. Traffic is something that I wasn't able to work out looked all over blogger for something and it seems that I needed to set up a counter like blog hit counter or stat counter which involved me slabbing some html code in at the beginning of the semester. Oh well know for next time that's for sure. As for ways that I could increase the traffic on my blog I think more images, videos and zippier title might draw in some off that lost traffic. I have also found that humour might be more appealing too. If you have ever read anything from 26bslash7 you will know what I mean the guy is just full of the most random things its hilarious. 

I think that social media sites are here to stay though I am unsure as to whether blogs will make the cut in the next few years. I might just be my ignorance to their true potential until well just now but with sites likes Facebook I suspect the fast updates from everyone on the same feed might just beat the blog in the social media race. Seems that this may be because  Facebook have a simple interface, the lack of customization means that there is a greater focus on network and content. Think that the news feed makes it alot easier too as you don't have to set anything up save for accepting a friend request. Where feed readers you might have to deal with a unfriendly interface just to keep up with you reading.

Maybe the future is a something that resembles facebook but has a few elements for customization and possibility of archiving particular posts that the user tag as a 'blog' post.

Maybe... I should approach facebook =D who knows. 

This blog has been my first baby steps into networked media and I am looking forward to starting a new blog during the winter term that talks about things I see on the internet, movies, tv shows, music, comics and games. I'll keep you guys posted.

BTW here are the links to my best three posts! 

Week 6- Carving Up The World

http://liquidimagery.blogspot.com/2010/03/lecture-week-6-carving-up-world.html

Week 9- Web 2.0

http://liquidimagery.blogspot.com/2010/04/week-9-lecture-web-20.html

Week 10- Multiplicity

http://liquidimagery.blogspot.com/2010/04/week-10-lecture-multiplicity.html

I would like to just say a final thanks to everyone been great meeting you all and I look forward to seeing you all next semester!

Week 15- Project B Rationale

My iTunes Data Vis
http://public.tableausoftware.com/views/ProjectB/ProjectBDataVisualisation?:embed=yes&:toolbar=yes

I decided that I was interested in seeing how my music taste has changed over the last four years. But to put it together I needed to put my data set together from Itunes. This proved to be quite time consuming as I built a new computer late last year so I had two different music libraries fixing the data in my spreadsheet was half the battle.

When it came to decided how to display this data I thought charts and graphs. So I did a search online for anything that I could use to design my data visualisation. I stumbled on to some software called Tableau which was exactly what I needed. With it I was able to import my data set from excel and create the fields and measure. This also had some really neat features but I had to do a little digging to get them working. Tableau has an online community and a knowledge base so with a few tutorials I was able to start constructing my data visualisation.

In my data visualisation I have created two graphs. One looks at an albums popularity according the time of year and further breaking up the results into the last four years. The bar graph itself is interactive as you can click or hover over the results in the graph to see how many time I listened to songs on that album. The months are colour-coded according to a legend I created. The user can select a particular month and see all the results for that particular month over the last four years. The second graph is a line graph. This looks at the way I listened to the music over time and has a trend line that allows the user to predict future listening habits. This trend line has also allowed me to see which bands are experiencing a long tail effect. Linkin Park is one band that is experiencing this effect. Although I don’t listen to them as often now I continue to go back to them unlike Johnny Cash which seems to have been a fad only lasting a month back in December ’09. I also incorporated a control sheet which has all the artist’s names so that you can select which artist you want to compare. I also attempted to incorporate hyperlinks for artist's myspace pages when you click their name in my bar graph however I wasn't able to work out how to assign each with a different url so at the moment so you can see what I wanted to achieve all names go to the same link. 

I have found related works which shows that society and certainly industry is interested in how people listen to their music. The link below shows how much money the record industry has lost over the last ten years due to the arrival and popularity of the digital format. Modern artists are selling less physical units as we as a society look to the internet and programs like iTunes for our music.

 http://www.tableausoftware.com/blog/record-industry's-lost-decade

This next link looks at an artist album and how many units it sells as a full CD or the individual tracks over a range of online music stores. This I think is an interesting approach of seeing the drop in sales.

http://www.tableausoftware.com/learning/examples/cd-sales-analysis

I followed convention with using graphs to show this data as it is simple and the results can be easily read and interpreted. I could have used the data is several other ways however I wanted it to be easily compared to what the previous two example. Sometime data visualisation can be just so wonderfully graphical and pretty that the actual results and meaning is lost. I wanted to make a point with my data so I kept it simple.

My data visualisation I think is just a little representation to what needs to be achieved on a large scale. I think that these examples are great at showing what units are selling or not selling. What they need to do now is look to the listeners sales don’t make them hits- it’s the way that the consumers listen to them that is. That is what my data visualisation is trying to achieve and that is what makes it different.

Week 13- How many things can I roll into a weekend?

The answer is a lot. Friday- preparing for my 21st then on Saturday I had the 21st, it was pretty sweet and a little disturbing how many times my baby photos were re-watched and now it is Sunday and its mother's day!
But never fear my Data Vis is coming along nicely at this point I'm wondering what I can add to it. At the moment I have two graphs one showing the popularity of an album by an artist. These results are broken up by years and months. This can show how my listening habits change according to the time of year. The other is a line graph and it shows from the date of import to the date I last played a song how I listened to it during that time. I have even added a trend line to this graph so we may predict future listening habits. From looking at it have seen that Linkin Park is currently experiencing the long tail effect. Now you might be thinking at the moment Justin! what you have there is an infographic but I have added a graph filter so you can tick which artists you want to compare and if that wasn't cool enough we have highlighting which allows you to click on a section of a graph and see how I listened to it in that particular month! At the moment I am looking at possibly doing a graph for genres but just toying with that at the moment and possibly linking these artists to amazon or itunes so you can check it out yourself. But thats just a few ideas see how I go.

Powered by Tableau

Week 12- Project B Update, Movies and Media

Haven't been up to alot this week just pushing to get this data visualisation done. It's been a bit of a slow slug as I am combining two computers music libraries to create my data set and its been rather tedious fixing the the import dates and play counts. Getting there really. So at this weeks tutorial I was looking at wix.com nice page that helps you to create websites in what can be a matter of minutes. I thought that this would be an effective and aesthetically pleasing way to present my data set. Since my project is looking at play counts as an indication for popularity over time I thought it would be appropriate to use graphs and charts.

In regards to movies and media. Iron Man 2 is pretty cool and for those who missed free comic book day, I pity you. But comes round every year, May 1st and chances are they still have loads of comics still I heard staff at Impact were concerned they weren't going to get rid of them all. That was at 3pm yesterday. Also in other news.  This is very very cool and really makes me wish I had money and time to do something like this!

The Nintendo Coffee Table!

Working Nintendo Cofee Table - Watch more Funny Videos

Now how cool is that... too bad the missus wouldn't let me have one...

Week 11- Data Visualisation

Well, this was our last lecture, sad no? But it did leave me personally with a lot to think about. Data Visualisation should well be everywhere! and they are and I can't help but feel like shouting "Why wasn't I informed?!" cause you can do so much and connect information that well frankly might not be connected! Say for instance that Colea example people were getting sick they did a data visualisation and where able to deduce that it was a particular pump on a particular street corner that was the source of the trouble!

I thought that the idea of inbuilt visual wetware was a pretty good way of looking at it. Shapes, scale, colour, movement and position. These are the elements that effect the way we interpret information and were pretty good at it.

So by my immediate enthusiasm for dataviz I'm sure its becoming apparent what I intend to do! But the question is what kind of data am I going to be going to look at? My itunes library! and you must be like 'why would we wanna know about that?' but I'm going to track my music listening back as far as I can and then look for correlations between the music and my life and events that have influence what and how much I was listening to and if that's not good enough then I'm going to add in a friend's library for comparison and see how our listening habits and tastes have deviated from each other. Fun no? So I will be looking at play counts, date of import, date last listened and see if we can find any music experiencing the long tail effect and what is really just a fad.

Week 10- Tute

So, been thinking about the idea that I was ranting about the other day- alternative to tag clouds and I have further developed it with a couple guys in my tutorial. So essentially if you remember this started off as an alternative to tag clouds. However, the site design has now become a service that will connect designers to companies that may need a fresh design for their business or a band that need a new t-shirt design. It's all about connections.

So what we have suggested is that we have a cloud graphic which you can search a tag for instance water. This will then bring up nodes of words that are related to water such as waves- then this allows you to look at designs or graphics that are wave related. From there you can click on a image and this will bring the image up and blackout the rest of the screen. You will have the graphic, a brief synopsis from the artist what it is about,  a method of contact and other works from the artist which you can dive into so sand graphic would then allow you to see his and then others designs involving sand.

With this we would like to offer user accounts for artists in doing so we could set up a chat system so that consumers could have live chats with artist about work they would like them to be involved in.

Technologies that this could involve- Sea Dragon so we have that smooth picture diving capability, APIs so that artists won't have to re-upload work to our server, we would probably rent out server space off-site for user information. Possibly page rank system for the popularity of particular designs and incorporating consumer feedback.

Possibly drawbacks- Bandwidth always with the bandwidth!

Ways to monetize- commissions so we have a small commission for providing the medium and contact between artist/designer and consumer.

I do have a step by step images but I did them in Flash so will have to post them later as I don't have flash on this system =)

Week 10 Lecture- Multiplicity

This weeks lecture was looking at a couple different things that all really tie together.
-Sampling
-Solutions to Insufficient Bandwidth
- Scale
-Iteration
-Collaborative Filter
-Crowd Sourcing- The wisdom of the crowd.

Rather than go through each thing individually this week I thought I would do just a quick overview and then talk about some articles I've been reading that caught my eye on the web.

Essentially, in the lecture we were looking at the wisdom of the crowd. The idea that the collective can do a better job than a single individual.
The example that Michael gave in the lecture was about the weight of the cow at a fair and the person who guessed closest won the cow. But what was cool was the average of all the answers was closer than the person who won. Now you might wonder what does this tell us? It tells us that the idea 'collective intelligence' is not restricted to the web and that a collective can answer better than an individual because each person brings their own knowledge to the table until you have an ultimate table of amazing intelligence or until you run out of chairs or until they realise the need to send someone to buy more chairs.

Iteration so doing a process over and over till you reach a result or destination. Now this is done with computers with music and video which Michael mentioned in the lecture. The computer reconstructs the audio or video till humans cannot tell the difference between the original and the copy.  This ties into solution to insufficient bandwidth- we can do fewer samples of the mp3 and it would take up less bandwidth. The other option is we develop a better method of compression.

So Michael quickly touched on Twitter and the scale it took off means that the Twitter guys needed to develop a way of monetizing it. If you haven't seen it Michael put an article up on moodle and though it was predictable, I must say that I'm a little disappointed with their solution (they have to make money I guess, least its a new way to present ads). The people at Twitter propose to put advertisements in your Twitter feed, however these ads will be directed at you specifically depending on key words that companies can buy. So if Starbucks wanted in on the action which I'm sure they will they might buy 'Starbucks' and 'coffee' for instance. Then depending on how often you tweeted using these keywords Starbucks tweets would come up in your feed to see. Things like discounts and offers and things. Twitter is currently charging companies for every 1000 tweets until they finalise their business model.

Personally I don't use twitter, don't really care what your doing right now. But its something that has taken off so hats off to the technology.

Another cool site I checked out earlier this week was 99 Designs. The idea behind that is you can come to this site and pay the site to run a design competition on your behalf. Then designers submit their designs and at the end of the competition the designer I imagine wins the contract and you get buy the rights to their designs. Really opens up the design community.

Anyway that's enough banter for today.
Lastly really can't wait to get into photosynth that's really cool stuff, internet has been shaped 4 more days sigh....

Week 9 Lecture- Web 2.0

 I find it hard to say without sounding geeky but I found the idea of Web 2.0 and its future relying on us really exciting. I read the web 2.0 and long tail articles before the lecture and could instantly see the community that the web has become. Up until this point I had taken this as a granted or given but the article web 2.0 really put it all into perspective. That collective intelligence on the web has resulted into things such as the long tail model is phenomenal. After reading it you can really get an appreciation for what people at the forefront of web 2.0 are trying to do.

I thought that the page rank system that Google implemented was interesting. Which pretty much catapulted them to internet glory in which they were able to start establishing their empire! Now I use the term empire due to a little segment I saw on the ‘Hungry Beast’ which you guys might like- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R7yfV6RzE30 unfortunately it’s not available on the site anymore but I still recommend checking it out!

The way that AJAX was implemented it the webpage Twistori I thought was really impressive and it had me thinking about possible webpage designs that could implement it in a similar way. My immediate thoughts were about tag clouds, not that I have a problem with tag clouds just they can be really ugly sometimes depending on the colours the designer picked. It can sometimes just make a page look a bit disorganised. So working on the same idea that Twistori put together, why not use it in a similar way for tag clouds. We create a search bar in a cloud graphic then when a user searches a tag AJAX does its thing and we have links to articles that are related to the tag fall out of the cloud down the page. When the user clicks on a tag as it passes we have the article pop up in a blackout window. User can then return to continue searching through articles.

We have two options with what happens with the articles that are still moving. It could just be a continuous cycle of a few articles or could we program the AJAX to freeze the feed of tags while the user is reading?

Anyone have any thoughts?

Project A Rational- Music Arena

With this project, I found I had to adjust my original idea several times.

This was due to either time constraints or personally not knowing enough programming to implement what I wanted to do. However I was able to adjust my idea enough that it really emphasised something I really enjoy- music.

I really like music and have always enjoyed reading reviews for albums before I go and pick it up myself whether I agree with the review does not matter as much as I have the chance to see in a summary the types of things they did on the record and it’s this type of thing that I wanted to explore with my webpage.

Problems I encountered during programming

• I did not know how to have content separate from the navigation bar.
• having a chat window where readers could comment directly onto the site
• alignment of media
• Implementing a custom search on the site,

Through talking to the lecturer, tutor and friends I was able to solve most of these problems.

For the navigation problem, I had considered using frames and Sharon had suggested that I use nested groups but it was during one of our updates where we got to see how everyone else was doing that I was able to solve this problem. I ended up using tables to create sections that would divide up my navigation bar and my review. This turned out to be good way to set up a basic template for the pages.

The chat window was a difficult one, I had viewed the source on several sites trying to decrypt their programming however this did not go anywhere as it looked as though I would need to set up some sort of array work which I think was delving into so Javascript. So I improvised, I knew I had to link my webpage to my blog. So, I utilized what I already had. The readers are able to access my page to comment on the reviews or make suggestions via my blog. This also makes this easier for me to manage as I can read the one page instead of ‘x’ number of reviews.

The alignment of media was something that also took me a while to get my head around. I spent some time searching code that would align the embedded files for me and I ended up using align=right in to get it on the right side of the page. However this proved troublesome with screens with a larger aspect ratio and when people used full screen. Luckily, I was able to ask Michael during his online sessions and solved it by creating a div class for the media. In that I specified the position to be absolute and the left alignment to be larger than my box which had the review. This then fixed it neatly to the right of the review.

Lastly, the problem with implementing a custom search was one that I was unable to solve. My original idea I had a custom search that would search the contents of the site and if the review you were looking for did not exist then it would redirect to a page where you could suggest that we do a review. I tried looking at source codes, went to friends who are programmers but they could not help me, I read numerous tutorials on how to create one but nothing explained how I could get the fields to work. Finally, emailed Michael about it and he suggested that I look at implementing custom search and look at Google custom search bars, if that did work then Javascript could do it though he did not expect me to be able to do that. Well, I looked into the Javascript, Perl and PHP. These proved to mean little to me as I have not programmed enough and with the project due date I had to look to Google. This however required me to be online so webs.com looked like the way to go.

I did play around with it a bit and webs.com was fine, Google Custom Search Bars proved to be a little more difficult. I tried to set it up to search the site, I read review on how to get Google Custom Search to work but it was not searching my website. I was just left with the cold words ‘could not find- mayday parade’. So I had to resolve to not having that set up and writing about it here. Hopefully, I will eventually understand how to program my own and will not have to deal with Google.

I understand that there are other sites that do similar things, such as Ultimate Guitar who review albums, instruments and is a database of tablatures for guitarists. There is also Song-meanings which is a database and a forum for discussing lyrics. Design conventions I have differed from these two sites. I have used a vertical navigation bar instead of the horizontal. This will allow me to add new pages to the site without compromising the content. Other conventions I have followed webpage logo is a link to the main page and content is in the centre with media to the right. Another think I have done is linked the album covers to the band’s myspace pages. That way the readers can find out more specific information about them such as tour dates and upcoming events

There is certainly a big audience for a website like my webpage to take part in. The way that I have tried to differ is opening up the ability to review to the readers. This way they play a larger part in the musical community by voicing their opinions and creating my own community or following with my page.

 Justin Yip u3053445

Music Arena Blog

This is your space to get your requests in for music reviews, send me your own reviews or chat to others's about bands that are currently on your playlist!

It's a free for all here so post them up!

Music Arena

Lecture Week 6- Carving Up The World

This weeks lecture was really interesting. Really liked having some philosophy thrown into the course breaks something I enjoy doing with something equal enjoyable. Anyway to the point, today's lecture examined humanity's innate need to categories everything and anything. So the actual meaning of the Cascading in CSS refers to the ability the code has in the CSS. If the code specifies in the body (being the largest tag) the font-family and font-size then that will apply to all of the style sheet because it was placed in the body. It now does not need to be specified anywhere else.

So, carving up the world was the idea we focussed on. We have created conventions that we just take for granted such as clothes, books, which side of the road we drive on and cuisine. These are all things that we have developed over time and its these conventions that we let define us. The same thing happens with creating interfaces we have a general idea what a web-page should look like because of all conventions that have been developed  since the internet's creation. However we have a fantastic opportunity at this current stage of the internet. While books for instance have been finished in design the internet's has a different set of affordances and limitations to the real world. Thus we are able to constantly develop new ideas for this technology as the physical limitations do not apply. As Michael said we can now move a hundred documents with a single drag where you would not be able to lift a hundred documents all at once in the real world.

A designing point, Michael made 'Sometimes conventions are worth following, until you are comfortable to break them.' I thought was really cool because what that meant was when we felt comfortable with the design conventions that there is always a place for us to create new ones. This is especially exciting as the idea that one of our designs could replace a current convention was mind-boggling.

Also, while looking at machine tags I wondered whether this what what I needed to incorpotate the search bar option in my web page. I have been investigating hopefully I can find something to get it running before the due date. Heres hoping.

HTML + CSS Semantic Mark-up

The Semantic Mark-up is definitely much easier than Presentational mark-up. Though I never really thought of HTML Semantic Mark-up cause I have always used it. Not to say that I knew that it was called that or anything just it was shown to me as a basic thing in HTML couldn't really imagine doing anything without it. Semantic mark-up is tags that help describe what is happening in the code. Such as when you use This is bold you are telling the computer that the text in between the 'B' tags are bold. Another one for instance is  This is emphasised here the text has been emphasised.

As for Non-semantic mark-up, I'm just going to take a stab at it but I think that presentational mark-up is a form of non-semantic mark-up. As Semantic means logical and reading presentation mark-up does not really come off logical to read. Welcome to the site  It's pretty messy and hard follow, you can decode it but far simpler and much more logical to assign tags. 

Cascading in Cascading style sheets refers to the fact that multiple style sheets can be applied to a single web-page.

My Assignment is coming along well still have a few things I would like to set up such as a Search Bar. Though I think that I will probably spend the most of the final week writing content for the each artist.

Week 4 Lecture- APIs and Mash Ups

Today at our lecture, we were looking at APIs, Mash ups and we also touched on Java Script.

Now, API  (Application Programming Interface) is a interface for between programs so that they can share data. This is really cool because the example given was that we could store photos on Flickr and then in our HTML for our web page we could write a line of code that can request the image or image set from Flickr. This I think is really nifty (a very technical term) as I don't need to store all my photos on my own server. API is all about accessing data in a functional way.

Another thing that I am looking forward to incorporating in my Project A is the use of

tag (division tag) to make my scripting a whole lot neater! So I can put this around content that I want to do stuff with later.

tags are styled with #ids or .classes. We then can assign our own tags in HTML rather than h1 or p and then we add style to these new tags using css.

Another enlightening fact we were told today is that we can actually have more than on CSS file. Admittedly this hadn't occurred to me in the slightest. #ids however can only have one meaning assigned. So we need to assign a class which can handle many.

Another cool trick was using the source file to get the extension to see the CSS file for the web page. so if we find anything that we like style wise we can check it out by adding the extension into the URL. Wolfenflickr I think is pretty cool, APIs could be used for all sorts of things. 'New ways of experiencing content" was the main idea that went with using APIs. Every Block is cool too however knowing about how many fire department dispatches their were between 1 and 4 baffles me at the moment. But who knows that might be something really important when collecting data about an American city (Everyblock not available anywhere else yet). But essentially it collects data from APIs about your local area and arranges them in a feed so you can see what is happening in your local area. 

Week 3 Lecture - HTML and CSS

Today’s lecture was really cool. Well as cool as writing HTML can be. Despite doing some in year 9, we never actually made it to CSS files. In fact the extent was here is a wad of HTML, write it out and play with it. I was astounded at the idea of writing the content for the site first and then add your HTML tags. I mean does that not sound simple to anyone else? Yet here I am writing it all out bit by bit, shame on me. CSS files as sad as it might sound, I find really exciting and I have not really done web page work for four years. I did some Dreamweaver in Year 12 but that is not really exciting its like I want this box, this tab and this picture and dump it all in.

So suddenly I find this proposal really fresh and exciting. I knew about how to access the source of a site however using it as a learning tool was not something I thought about. So at the moment I am looking for a text editor, I used to just use notepad but there looks to be some really cool ones out there so why not have a look around before I start.

Week 2 Lecture

So my immediate question is how should I do this? By 'this' I refer to the typing and the blog that is to come about by my transference of thoughts to typing, to the bits of information that make up what you’re reading now. Really that was just a long winded was of saying that I haven't really thought about a blog before... another question is whether I am restricted to what I thought about the lecture or whether I can draw on my other interests to provide an understanding for my choices and influences for this course...

 The lectures I have found fairly informative though most of which I have already covered. Although approaching it from a media production point of view I find rather refreshing from the dry IT classes I had during my time at college. The traffic found on blogs is pretty amazing though the death of print is also a saddening idea though I suppose that it was bound to happen when you consider what this format has provided to users. Now I have chosen Blogger for my blog as I am a Gmail user and we were told to look at Google reader as well so having all of these programs accessible to the one account seemed sensible to me. However I do admit I have found Blogger’s templates restricting and pulling HTML templates of the net has been rather troublesome. Hopefully Sort it out soon.

I find it funny that RSS feeds came up actually because it was only just recently did I start using FEED DEMON 3.0. Though, I originally got it to check web-comics rather than blogs. I find it quite nice being a bit nervous and excited about studying again last 2 weeks feel like I haven't had a chance to do much else than read require readings. My only thoughts are that I need a little time to settle in I guess. It's sort of a rude awakening when you consider that I spent the last year off working and just doing whatever when I came home. Music I find takes up a lot of time, at this point it more listening than actual playing though which is a little sad though I fear I might be forever condemned to playing chords and rhythm guitar as I don't practice enough!

Oh well, thoughts on what I might do my assignment on... Probably music related maybe a little art too? I don't know maybe I could curate a site that review art, web comics, music and other media formats. I imagine that this blog will take that avenue when writing including the weekly lecture post.