Reflective “meta” post:

1) Data visualisation
I chose this blog as one of my favourites for a couple of reasons. Firstly I found nearly all of the lectures for this Unit very engaging. The lecture on Data Visualisation was particularly interesting.

Humans are very visual beings and the Internet is full of wonderful visual things for us to enjoy. There are many wonderful ways for us to represent and analyse data. Although data visualisation isn't anything new. The different ways people come up with creating visual representations of data is. Another reason I chose this blog is because I thought it was one of my better constructed posts using images, links and written content

2) Multiplicity
This post was one of my longer posts. Again, like many of the things we discussed in lectures, I found it interesting. I chose this post because I wrote it in class quite quickly but at the end of it was left with a large amount of information.

I learnt about the topic as I wrote from Mitchel and by reading what I could online. The sheer number of people online and the speed at which people can communicate and share ideas is amazing. The use of our collective ideas and the ever growing communities that for online are jaw dropping and they have led too and will lead to more amazing possibilities that we can only imagine.

3) Screw-you-sytimg.com
This post was chosen because since I installed Google Analytics it received the most hits. Its receiving the most hits also demonstrated some of the things we discussed in the unit. As the post states I had a problem with YouTube videos not loading. I went on the hunt for answers! and on my hunt i found other people with the same problem and some people giving advice on what sytimgcom was and how they fixed the errors they were having etc.

This reinforced what i spoke about with multiplicity, The Internet and the different community networks we engage in on our travels online are full of people with problems , people with solutions and people with ideas.

No matter what topic your interested in, its unlikely that if you wont find anyone else interested in the same topic or someone that has some knowledge in that field.

Conclusion:
I've used the Internet for many years now and have been a part of many online communities. Its would have to undoubtedly one of the best networking tools we posses. Unlike conventional communication systems we can have immediate, interactive and rich communication with people all over the world. Not just text but image as well as voice and video conference.

Blogs are one part of the way some people chose to share ideas and communicate with people online. Even though I've would not have started a blog without it being a requirement of this unit i have found it an enjoyable activity.

Most of the traffic my blog received was from other classmates and friends/family. And about 20% was "outside traffic" from people that had found certain posts through google searches related to those topics.

Which Web Broswer is Best?

With the new release of Bing from Microsoft. I have wanted to compare them. I found this task a little difficult as when i have used Google for many years now and find myself being a little bias. However I found a great site via Mashable called Blindsearch. This page allows you to make a search and displays the results from 2 of the major search engines Google & Yahoo plus the new browser Bing. The twist is however that it does not tell you which engine came up with each set of results until u vote for the engine that came up with the results that u find most appropriate.

Project B + Rational

Project B + rational

Google wave

Check this out! This is Googles new pet project. Well not exactly new..they've been working on it for nearly 2 years. It looks like its going to be a pretty cool way for people to interact with one another over the net. I'm pretty excited about getting to play around with it.

Wordle:Noobtube through the eyes of Wordle

ImageProvided by http://www.wordle.net/. Images of Wordles are licensed .

Data Visual

Visual representation of Blog data

• From first to last post, 1 representing the first post, 2 the second ect....

• The larger the numeric representation the more words within that post. Each word in the post is represented by an extra pt in text size

• The colour of the number represents the number of links, pictures and videos in the post its representing.

• Using the RGB colour scale I multiplied the value of links,picture and videos by the following amounts:
  

Video results x100 on the Red value.
Links result x10 on the Green value.
Picture results x50 result on the Blue value.
The maximum being 255 on any of the scales, so if the number exceeded 255 it was just represented at the max value (255)

The reason they were multiplied by different amounts was to show a larger colour difference than would have otherwise been achieved if each were multiplied by the same amount

Here is the RGB data for the Colouring of the numbers:

Post number		Red value		Green value		Blue value
1		0		40		0
2		0		20		50
3		0		10		0
4		100		30		0
5		0		10		0
6		100		10		0
7		0		40		50
8		0		10		0
9		100		10		0
10		100		110		0
11		0		50		0
12		0		50		0
13		0		60		0
14		100		110		0
15		100		110		50
16		100		90		50
17		0		90		0

Test of Blog Data

Below is data accumulated from this site . This information is going to be used in a Data Visualization Project I'm currently working on. The data was accumulated manually by copy/pasting blog posts into Microsoft Word and using its word count tool and then I entered the information into Microsoft Excel spreadsheet.

Post Number		Post title (Eldest to Newest)	Word Count		Video Clips		Link Count		Pictures
1		Birth of NoobTube	119		0		4		0
2		Photo Editing Exercise	36		0		2		1
3		World of Warcraft - Patch 3.1	39		0		1		0
4		Ronald Jenkees	70		1		3		0
5		HTML lesson	116		0		1		0
6		Flickr Slide Show	54		1		1		0
7		SquareSpace	134		0		4		1
8		Project A Rational	638		0		1		0
9		Clay Animation	58		1		1		0
10		Gumby a distant cousin of Wallace&Gromit?	174		1		11		0
11		Screw you... s.ytimg.com	291		0		5		0
12		YouTube Blues...	117		0		5		0
13		Multiplicity	506		0		6		0
14		BodyBuilding	418		1		11		0
15		Data Visualization	364		1		11		1
16		Why dont you go and have a good Rasterbate!	139		1		9		1
17		Tracking Blogger Statistics	160		0		9		0

Tracking Blogger Statistics

Wordpress.com blogs have an inbuilt blog statistics module that allows the author of the blog to track the amount of traffic his/her blog is attracting. Its is a useful tool, probably more so for people that have online business or alot of advertising on their site but also useful for ordinary blogger to see how big there viewer base is.

Blogger.com however doesn't have an inbuilt module offering this service. Blogger.com is owned by Google and they offer a tool called Google Analytics. Its quick to set up, specially if you already have a Google account, and it can track statistics for your blog. It is quiet detailed and will list repeat visitors, number of site hits per day,month,year plus alot of other interesting statistics. I recommend anyone with a blogger account to test it out.

As well as Google Analystics you could check out

• Bravenet Hit Counter
• Free Stats
• Easy Hit Counters
• StatCounter
• Sitemeter
  

Why dont you go and have a good Rasterbate!

Rasterbate No..its not when Rastafarian's pleasure themselves it is creating a picture larger than a piece of paper by printing out the picture in sections sized to a page, then connecting those pages in the proper order.

This is not exactly a new concept and the software to do this sort of thing has been around for a while but it looks like something you could have alot of fun with. Im going to be playing around with a few of my own.



Free software for a keen Rasterbator @ homokaasu.org or you could also check out arje.net

Michael Kingery from the USA has an informative Beginners Guide to large scale rasterbation



by Michael Kingery

There as some really amazing results you can achieve but take a look through this gallery for inspiration. Now go have a good rasterbate!

Data Visualization

Data visualization, the representation of data in a visual way.
According to Michael Honey, lecturer at University of Canberra, visual displays of small amounts of data that are already quiet easily processed by a person are called Info graphics. This in essence is what the students of Network Media are going to explore.

We are more interested in Data Visualization that can give access quickly and effectively to the masses that without the visual representation would have a difficult if not impossible task to digesting the information.

Here is a simple but effective data visualization of data from both the American and Iraqi governments and other news organisations. It displays information for the to date 2,592 recorded deaths of American and coalition troops over the course of a year.This was a visual data representation that was used in The New York Times.




Adam Ostrow from Mashable a social media guide, listed 16 Visualization Tools that he found "visually stunning and delightfully useful".


Top of the list was Fidg't.
The Fidg't Visualizer allows you to play around with your network. You interface with the Visualizer through Flickr and LastFM tags, using any tag to create a Magnet. Once a Tag Magnet is created, members of the network will gravitate towards it if they have photos or music with that same Tag.


One I thought was great,specially considering the way we look at the Internet in our Network Media Unit (how different sites and people communicate, share information and form online communities), was Walk2Web which allows you to visualize the connections between sites, while allowing to view, review, bookmark and vote for your favorite sites. Here's a video that explains how it works.



There is an incredible amount of data that is already accumulated in different data banks and this is continual growing. With access to the Internet being more readily available to more and more people via portable phones and other portable devices. The Internet has become a rich source of data with alot of information that is submitted by people that although seems mundane by itself when amasses and displayed in a visual format can produce some beautiful and interesting concepts of data evaluation.

BodyBuilding

Well after spending a good part of the last 5 yrs bumming around on the computer, I had this crazy idea... "Hey 'I'm going to get fit"..
I have a friend that plays sports, lifts weights and all that sorta stuff weird people like him do. So to cut a long story short after chatting to this friend i decided.."I'm going to pump iron and be a super fit, super chiseled, super nerd!"

So I got a bit of a weights training training of my friend. But being curious started to trawl Google for any information i could find on Bodybuilding..and wow is there plenty. Firstly though I had to make my way past the masses of advertisements trying to sell miracle powders, liquids and training equipment. A few of which are listed in this Hall of Shame.

What I found out as I read bodybuilding sites and forums was that the most important part of natural body building and fat loss was firstly nutrition and secondly cardio exercises, like running,swimming and cycling. Then of course lifting heavy weights..

One of the better sites i found was Scoobys Workshop The site was creating by a 48yr old American guy known as Scooby. He talks about what he feels are the most important aspects of natural bodybuilding, lists workouts for beginners, intermediate and advanced bodybuilders. Talks about nutrition and equipment. I liked this site as there was no advertising and he seems very genuine in wanting to help people out with what he's learnt over the years in regards to lifting weights and general fitness.

One of the things I learnt that was pretty common through out the different forums and sites in regards to nutrition was that bodybuilders eat 5-6 meals per day instead of what is commonly known as the healthy amount three. They eat these smaller and more frequent meals to have a continual amount of protein in their system to feed muscle growth. After looking at scoobys video about quick and simple meals at home you'll start to realise the lengths some of these guys go in the quest for a muscly body:

Another site on natural Bodybuilding that i found was Adams natural Bodybuilding Site Again alot of information but alot of it was covered by Scooby. One thing that was cool was Adam had a link list with some intreating sites. On the other side this site seems to be run by some pretty hardcore christians. So brace yourselves for a few Helliluya's.

Multiplicity

Multiplicity is all around us, in everyday life. However the power of multiplicity has never been so apparent as it is now when harnessed by the internet!
Multiplicity in the sence that I am using it is the dealing of people or information that without the use of a computer or the internet we would find unfathomable as a lone human.

Prior to the internet and computers a couple of classic examples of multiplicity could be workers on a factory line, all doing a small part to put together a final product in hours or days instead of taking one person weeks,months or years to do by themselves. Or maybe multiple reporters collaborating their reports and articles together to form a newspaper.

Following the theme of collaborated publishing, I'm going to investigate Wikipedia . Wikipedia is a free online encyclopedia. Which makes it interesting and relevant to how multiplicity can be such a powerful tool is that wikipedia enables anyone on the internet to edit and contribute to this forever evolving collection of information. Unlike a conventional Encylopedia the articles can be constantly updated whilst still being in circulation. And unlike a conventional Newspaper on author can edit another authors article by adding or correcting content.

One of the great aspects of multiplicty in the case of wikipedia is that instead of just one authours knowledge of a current topic. It invites multiple authors to build a piece of work, this could range from a humanaly managable number of 5 or 10 authors to the unmanagable number of 1000's. It also allows topics to be covered in depth that in conventional publications could be overlooked or thought to be irrelevent.

Because wikipodia invites anyone with an internet access to contribute, current and popular topics can be covered and published online at incredible speed. As an example Swine flu A strain of pig influenza that evolved in such a way that it could be passed onto humans. This was new, but within hours information about it could be found on wikipedia. Unlike a Newspaper that might give one medical experts imformation on the topic wikipedia allows any number of experts to give information. However because you dont need any qualifications or proven knowledge to write an article, sometimes the information displayed is not entirely accurate, but the fact that its up there and open to others with maybe more knowledge in the field to edit and add too is great.

The format of wikipedia can lend itself easily to other more specific topics and communities one example is Wowwiki Which like wikipedia is a collection of information by thoasands of authours but its all information related to World of Warcraft an online multiplayer game(mmorpg). It covers all aspects of the game, again some aspects that you would have alot of trouble finding information on is readily available because of the sheer number of people on the internet posting about what they enjoy and have knowledge in, be it gameplay,programing,lore,class mechanic's, pve elements of the game or pvp.

YouTube Blues...

Well my Youtube problem is still bugging me. When i go to watch clips I just get a black box and I hang with s.ytimg.com in my browser loading bar. So i went on the hunt for Youtube alternatives!
I took a look at Vimeo which seems like a pretty decent video hosting site.They target High resolution video users supporting HD video in full 1280x720 resolution! Requiring a broadband internet connection if you wish to keep your sanity.. most people have adsl or better these days anyway.

Another video host i looked at briefly was Blip.tv. But i havent had enought time to full evalute it just yet so ill come come back to this tomorrow :P

Screw you... s.ytimg.com

Well I had a fun evening. I was playing round with the webmaster options on my Blogger/Google account. Then noticed that after I had set myself up as a webmaster video clips weren't loading up on YouTube. In the bottom bar i could see my browser was getting stuck on s.ytimg.com. So i went on the hunt!! What was this s.ytimg.com that my browser was getting stuck on!
One guy called Keith has dedicated a large part of his blog to this s.ytimg.com but i dont know how accuarte his information is, he sounds a little to much of a conspiracy theorist for me to take too seriously.

Anyway.... How could I stop it from screwing up my Youtube. I found a few threads with people having similar problems mainly on the Yahoo Answers.com. Nothing about it being linked to enabling Webmaster tools on my Google account though. But I was sure that it must have been linked. All the responses to solving this error had been "Delete your cookies!" so that what i did..and nope, still wouldn't work.

So i went about removing the webmaster tools i had enabled on my Google account! after looking around on my Google account options and searching the web for answers i came to the realisation I had to Delete my Google account! That will fix the problem.. Wont it?..

So that's what I did, I then realised that It deleted my Blogger blog, My igoogle set up, my Youtube account,My Reader account, and probably some other stuff that i haven't remembered to check yet. Lucky for me I had my forum posts backed up to a word document :)

However Now my blog has been remade, renamed and updated.. Its now named NoobTube!

Gumby a distant cousin of Wallace&Gromit?

My last post was a about a short clay animation I found on YouTube. Clay animation looks fun and interesting. I know in this day and age i should probably be focusing on computer generated animation instead, but im pretty sure that clay models are still scanned into computer to help aid the fabrication of 3d computer animation anyway. An old and well known animation is Gumby. Gumby was created in mid 1950's and is a good example of early clay animation. Heres a short clip to jog the memory:



A more recent example of clay animation is Chicken Run. Made by Aardman Animations. The same studio that produced Wallace and Gromit.

If you click this link you'll see a great list of animations dating from 1955 too 2006 which include alot of different works produced by Will Vinton who ill cover in more depth in a later post.

A few starting places for people interested in clay animation are: The Clay Animation and Stop Motion How To Page, PT3 and Clay Animation Station.

Clay Animation

I was browsing youtube looking for some of the most popular youtube vids of all time, this one popped up. I'm not sure why as it doesn't have nearly as many hits as some but it was excellent.
I loved the clay work and has inspired me to try some of my own.. at a later date :P

Project A Rational

I chose to curate an online gallery. I used 10 untitled pictures taken by my brother who is a professional photographer I did this for 2 reasons

1) It made getting permission to use the pictures a lot easier for me as I could simply phone him and ask.
2) I thought if I was going to curate an online gallery the least I could do was promote my brothers work!

I tried multiple site builders and blogs as my platform like adobe lightroom and wordpress.com. In the end I settled for blogger.com for my platform and Flickr.com for my image host.
I mainly used these two sites because of their ease of use, and because I could upload my images onto their servers without having to host the site myself or use a paid service.

The site is made up of the following:
A header with the title of the exhibition, and the artist’s name. I used one of the photos I liked and felt represented the exhibition title best. I did the editing for the header in Photoshop and inserted it through the layout settings in Blogger.

On the top left is an Artist bio, giving the reader a background on the photographer.
Next I created a RSS feed display. The last 3-4 comments made on the photos below are displayed here. This is to encourage people to make comments on the photos and interact with the site. Its also a quick way for people visiting the site to see what others think about the pictures without having to view the individual comment box from each photo. Next to that is a RSS link so that people can also add a RSS feed to a personal RSS reader if they have one.

How and why the photos were displayed:

I chose to place a slide show of the photos for the first post. This gave people a way to see the photo content without having to scroll down through numerous pictures and also let me play around with embedding. The photos were hosted on a flicker account where I made a private group of images to host from. If this was not for assessment purposes I would have got the artist to create a flicker account under his name to host from so that the title on the flicker slideshow show read “Discarded from Pierre Curry on Flickr” rather than “Discarded from Anthony Curry on Flickr”. I didn’t want to be any confusion on who did the work though
.
After that is the Artist Statement where the Artist has given some insight into the background of where the photos were taken and what he envisioned they would represent. (It’s also from that statement that the title of the exhibition came from).

I have placed the images in individual blog posts so that people can comment on them, I also made it so anonymous users could post comments on pictures because I find often when people are forced to create to comment on something they don’t bother. And I wanted people to be encouraged to give their opinions on the pictures.

I used a template from a template site for this and played around with the html source a little. I changed the background colour from clear to mid grey as mid grey apparently is meant to be the best background from which to display photos. I tried to edit the middle section to grey as well but had trouble finding the piece of code. I used a very handy site to find the colour codes http://websitetips.com/colortools/sitepro/. I tried very hard to get a list of thumbnails instead of slideshow but I couldn’t get one to work for me. All in all I’m pleased with how my site turned out. I think it’s simple and effective.

SquareSpace

Whilst looking for different formats to display my images for the curate an online exhibition assignment I came across a web service called Squarespace that costs 8$ a month....I know I know, $8 dollars is alot for a uni bum but there is a 15day trial for u to see if u think its worth it.

I was going to create my assessment on the trail and hope my trial lasted for the duration of the marking process but didn't want to take that risk so instead i created my exhibition on Blogger. It is alot more limited compared to Squarespace but its free!!
Here is a one of the pictures i have on display on my online gallery


You can check out the rest my Online gallery here : Discarded by Anthony Curry

Flickr Slide Show

Ive been working on a project for Network Media Production in which im to exhibit a series of photos. Im working on an embeded slideshow from Flickr. I also tried using Lightroom which works quiet well if u have your own host. Here is an example using Photos taken by my brother Pierre Curry.

HTML lesson

Ive been looking at different HTML lessons so that I can get a better grasp of it. I came across one written by Tom Schneider.

He pretty much runs over alot of the things we went through in our first html tutorial at UC.
He Explains what HTML is and then follows up with a brief lesson and explains some of the common tags.

I got left behind a little in class when we did this so its good to have a lesson like this to refere too. Easy HTML Lesson. If anyone else has found lessons for HTML or CSS, would be great if u could comment to this post with a link to it.

Ronald Jenkees

Here's a guy I found on YouTube called Ronald Jenkees. Hes a bit of a YouTube sensation and some of you have more than likely already heard some of his stuff.
Its not exactly the style of music I generally listen too, however I liked this. He is extremely talented and its pretty catchy. He is pretty goofey but very funny! One of my preferred tunes is Disorganised Fun enjoy.

World of Warcraft - Patch 3.1

The new content patch for wow should be out by the end of this month.
Along with the usual class nerfs, buffs and tweaks we will see a new instance called Ulduar. Patch notes can be found at :http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/patchnotes/test-realm-patchnotes.html

Photo Editing Exercise

oto

Photo edit

Originally uploaded by Anthony Curry

This is a picture I edited for my Introduction to Media Production unit.

It was taken by my brother Pierre Curry, you can find more of his work at Focused Imagery

Birth of NoobTube

Well I lost my blog, its a long story, and one i wont bore you with.However theres been some changes! Below is my original "first" post i had the good fortune to have all my forum posts backed up on my computer. As you will see if you read below this blog use to be called "imparting life". However that name is no longer available. So now its known as NoobTube!!

Oringinal Post

"Hello everyone. My name is Anthony Curry. I am in my first year of studies in Media Arts and Production at University of Canberra. Im intreasted in gaming and animation.

I have never blogged before and am doing it for the first time as an assesment for my unit Networked Media Production. I’ll be compiling information I find intreasting on animation, games, new movies, current university projects and anything else i find along the way on my blog journey.

I chose the title Imparting Life for this blog becuase the orgin of the word animation derives from L animātiōn- (s. of animātiō a bestowing/imparting of life). Also to impart is to share, pass on and transmit information and ideas which i found fitting for a blog."