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.