Networked Media Production Week 11

This week was all about datavisualitsation- lots of different and cool ways to present data. I have a few ideas on what data I want to present, so far I am considering looking at UFO sightings from around the world. Maybe have light dots on every location of UFO sightings, or have the globe rotating but that would be a little too advanced.

In the lecture Michael was talking about how it's important to present the data in a way where the viewer can acquire useful information, to learn or come to a conclusion about the topic based on the way the data is presented. Which is why I want to sort of focus on a more analytical approach to this assignment rather than present statistics in an attractive way. Except I'm not sure how I will achieve this with UFO sightings. Maybe analyse where most UFO sightings occur to maybe come to the conclusion along these lines:

- If you directly relate UFO's to aliens, then maybe look at the location with the most UFO sightings and see why UFO sightings are occurring more in this region rather than other regions.

- Is it because of useful material that these locations offer, or is it a cultural sort of construct, where there are stronger believers in UFO's and aliens in this particular region, that these people are made to believe that anything peculiar moving in the sky is most likely a UFO.

In my opinion this is an interesting assignment, I think datavisualisation is an important and more attractive way to educate.

Networked Media Production Week 10

This week in our tutorial we had to come up with an idea of an online service that makes use of collective intelligence.

Our idea is based off the same sort of concept that amazon offers. Keeping in mind this idea is pretty futuristic.

Idea – Online, multiplicity, collective intelligence.

Extensive online 20 page personality report, based on the report it creates an application for smart phones, apple product etc that categorises all your interests, sort of like a personal tag cloud. It connects with all major stores, grocery, clothing even car dealerships (assuming that these major companies have geo-tagged products – so the application can direct to you to certain items in the store based on your personal preference). It also takes your bank balance, and weekly income into consideration. It’s function is, when entering the store, e.g. Clothing store, you can go to a rack of t-shirts, tag the shirt and it comes up with other suggestions of other clothing in the store, sort of like when you get a book from amazon, it comes up with suggestions based on your previous purchases. Based on your income, it will also suggest items that you will like as well as within your price range.

The application is free thanks to multiple sponsors who pay money to advertise their business e.g. if you usually get hungry at a certain time, it comes up with suggestions based on your regular food choices e.g. 1pm - 2 dollar slushies at Maccy D’s.

Networked Media Production Week 9

This week Michael talked about how various sources (especially on the internet) can retrieve information about specific events and viewed by users before being released by the media. Now, the internet can provide more information one would need/want to acquire rather than purchase books at a book store, read the newspaper or watch TV etc. Data created by people from around the world, collected and harnessed by various users - Wikipedia is the first place people look to gain basic knowledge on a topic they're interested in, anyone can contribute to articles, information gathered and expressed by many sources and put into the one article. Michael also talked about how people can get information about recent events from Twitter before seeing it on television.

Information can be retrieved and provided in a variety of forms. In the lecture Michael also talked about AJAX, to make web applications more dynamic. - Flickr, Google Trends, Google Maps etc. This site talks about Asynchronous JavaScript and XML and offers techniques to help improve web applications - http://java.sun.com/developer/technicalArticles/J2EE/AJAX/

Web 2.0 is also affiliated with web applications, e.g. Tag clouds - key words that link directly to other sources of information which is a technique used to primarily foster collective intelligence on the web. Tim O'Reilly defines Web 2.0 in his article - http://oreilly.com/web2/archive/what-is-web-20.html - it includes tables that compare applications from Web 1.0 to Web 2.0, simple directories on the internet (taxonomy) evolving into tags (folksonomy) being one of the comparisons.

And that's my blog for this week.