Meta Blog Post

This is my last blog post, so let's analyze all!

This blog was made for the unit Networked Media Production of the University of Canberra and it is a significant part of the final grade, that may explain why every week the topics written are related to the content given by Mike on lectures and by Ben on tutorials.

Every week is a different story and every week this blog has a post explaining and analyzing what we learned. I consider the blog a very important way of expressing our ideas by making public the content and allowing people to comment.

Sharing information is the future and the present on the internet; that is exactly what we learned and that is also what we are doing by writin

g on this blog.

For this blog I choose blogger because I consider this is (in my opinion) the best blog free admin, and also I have used it before for other blogs; one of the best features in blogger is the blog admin, which on the main site allows me to choose between my blogs and edit the content.

My blog has one feature that is my favorite, the name is "Google Analytics" which is a free online application that allows me to see the number of visitors with countries and the time. This free online tool is oriented on for the Google Ad Sense, which is the advertising tool of google.

Because this is a school blog, it seems to be few visitors per week, which is normal in this kind of sites. The website counter options are hun

dreds, and no always need to paste some code on the html part of the blog like on Google Analytics, for example: statbrain.com, which is a site that creates a page with the aproximate number of visits, I have to say that is not as accurate as Google Analytics but seems to be close.

Sharing content online is the best way to show our ideas that's why depending on the content that is designed to be shown the amount of visitors may vary.

Some blogs are focused on the amount of clicks on the ads that the visitors make, only for making money, and I can say this is not my case.

Now I will share the blog posts that in my opinion are the best, because of its content and and the way I wrote about the topics related :

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

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

http://nmpalex.blogspot.com/2010/03/no-lecture-reflection-week.html

So I hope you guys enjoyed reading my blog.

Cheers,

Alejandro.

Final Blog Post

The time goes fast, i have always known that; I can see myself writing my last week post of Networked Media Production.

During this time we learned heaps of information that are gonna be usefull for the rest of my studies. The primary objective of me as an exchange student in UC is to pick up as much information as possible and take it back to my home contry and apply it on my daily life.

My favorite topic was the importance of using the CSS on the creation of HTML sites, before in my home university I used to create websites by using tables and more tables on html, but now i know a better option exist and makes the code more clean and clear.

Sometimes when we are online clicking on the different websites we don't often analize the content that is being presented to us, but this is on the past, because now when a website call my attention I try to analyze the code by clicking on the "view code" option, by doing this I can view the different ways of giving structure and learn from the others work.

About the blog I think is a very important tool that is offered to us for free, and let us share our way of thinking and letting the people to feedback opinions in order to make an free online comunity sharing sistem.

In my particular case as a media designer the blog is one of my most powerful tools to show my possible clients and people interested in my work my designs and my opinion about projects news and different stuff.

Cheers,

Alejandro.

Rationale ProjectB

The final project came and the rules are very clear, there are two kinds of final projects, from which I chose the geo-narrative story.

The reason why I chose this project because I find interesting being able to tell a story and to complete the context through the mapping tool "Google Earth", I had written some stories befo

re, but never considered the whole idea of designing the environment in which takes place.

Google Earth is one great tool that every day I discover new features, the creation of custom maps is useful for the fact that has streets and some mapping interesting content making the browsing experience more complete and easily.

The moment of brainstorming had come to my he

ad, and now the question is… on that subject would begin to write? My always effective method to begin brainstorming is to take any book, put on the table, begin to turn the pages slowly coming to rest on some random page pointing somewhere, so you get different words which can then be written on a sheet, with those we can begin to formulate ideas around them, the words that came out this time are: bank, calendar, and mask.

The time has come to unite the ideas, it sounds like a story of men with masks, banks and agendas ... the decision was taken.

The story I wrote about an ordinary man like us who live in the city of Canberra, but all is not normal in your life because it has a secret side that not many people know ... a secret is a super hero, but not the typical story that we're used to American films, is a clerk wearing a Mexican wrestling mask, he has no super powers as usual in these stories, is just a citizen who is tired of all the injustices that have lived in their city, so he decided to a

ct and begin to fight against crime.

The city of Canberra is small and quiet so a fictional super hero story sounds a little bit interesting in times where it sounds pretty distant from any common situation.

The story has a bit of what we all know is the normal formula of the action stories, has a bad dude, a good mate and a society that is manipulated by the media. The reason I decided to include the media in my story is to show the great influence that can have on the decision of the people.

During the photo shoot which was taken in the Belconnen area, were used various scenarios that served as references to history, always taking care of the relationship between history-map to which we are referring, most were taken in areas surrounding the university Canberra.

The images were edited in Photoshop to adjust size, and edit the colours, finding the best ways in which visually fit the story, I also decided to modify a little lighting on the pictures to make them more interesting.

To store the images used Flickr which is a yahoo

tool because it gives me all I need of storage facilities, as easy as with one click I can get a URL with which I can easily link on my google map.

Flickr is a website that presents as diverse as positive tools, also has its limitations particularly for those like me who do not have a premium account.

Now with photos stored on the Internet it was time to start joining my story connecting the content previously added to the maps with images and history in general.

Final Project Link

http://maps.google.com/maps/ms?hl=es&ie=UTF8&msa=0&msid=113752219511818910705.0004859a99d641f101658&ll=-35.264123,149.119492&spn=0.168754,0.363579&z=12

Flickr link:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/10709237@N04/sets/72157623925565633/detail/

I hope you guys enjoy it.

Alejandro Gatica

My Ideas for the final project

As i said in the post before, I chose the option of the geo-narrative story, i have written already all of it, i have now to write the rationale in order to finish most of it.

During the process of making my story is important to say that I decided as location Canberra,

because even if I just moved here three months ago I feel this was a very nice way of learning different parts of the city.

Google maps is a very powefull online tool, and the best part is that is free!, with google maps we can search from addresses to postal codes, we can also take a look to the streets on "street view" which makes this the most complete free mapping software online.

It was a very good idea to propose the use of google maps for the final geo-narrative story, this completes the story locating every character anytime.

Canberra is the place where my superhero story is gonna take place.

Week 12

Just 2 weeks more...

The tutorials have finished is time to work on the final project B, I began to create my geo narrative story, is gonna be very interesting.

My idea of the story is from a masked man that saves the city of canberra from the bad people, the thing is that the good masked man is wearing a wrestling latin american mask, i thought it was a good idea mixing the latin american culture with the american super hero stories.

My story begins with this:

One more day for Ricardo

Ricardo is an ordinary man, gets up early every day, takes a bath, makes his breakfast, goes out to pick up his newspaper, drinks his tea and go

es to work.

He works as a content editor in the local news channel. His job day consist in arrive exactly twenty-five seconds before 10:00 am which is the time limit. He walks to his office approximately in fifty-three seconds; he greets his secretary Jessica, prepares a coffee and enters to his office.

Week 11 Datavisualization

In this week lecture we learned how datavisualization has became one of the most atractive ways of showing the content to the user, everything began with the code which contains all the information that is gonna be shown, but in a nonunderstandable way.

After or before the code comes the design which depending on the kind of interactivity that we want to application.

Some of the most important features that datavisualization must have are: exploration, layering, interactivity, avilability of data, comparison of datasets.

During the tutorial we had time to analize some of the different options in datavisualization contained on a list of delicius.com, during this process of analizing the content we were asked to explain one of the sites, the

site I chosed was the differences between the people that lives on Manhattan island on NYC at daytime, and nightime, I have to say that it was not a very interactive application, but was very interesting to see how at nightime almost anyone lives on the island beacuse of the expensive prices.

http://strawdogs.wordpress.com/2009/04/30/new-york-night-and-day/

Week 10 Multiplicity

During this lecture we saw the concept of multiplicity, this concept was very interesting, after trying to analize the way that works some of the algorithm secuences on the uses interfaces.

The quiz the question was to "Guess Mike's Weight", and I answered "73 kilos" because I wrote kilos the answer was programmed to detect just numbers, and because my question was a mix of both WAS WRONG, and I know that every answer was ok for everyone, please fix it :-) tnks.

On the tutorial we made a team and our conclusion is the next:

Our idea is based off the same sort of concept that amazon offers. Keeping in mind this idea is most likely possible in the future.

Idea – Online, multiplicity, collective intelligence.

Extensive online 20 page personality report, based on the report it cr

eates 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 TACK is free thanks to multiple sponsors who pay money to advertise their business, 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.

Cheers,

Alex.

Week 9 Web 2.0

In this week we learned about web 2.0 and it's differences with the older web.

The best definition for web 2.0 is the fact of calling it "Collective Intelligence ", this takes me to the idea that for making posible the web 2.0 we need the interaction of a big amount of users.

Some of the concepts that the web 2.0 use are that it needs from usability, participation, convergence, remixability, standarization, css, and ajax.

Some of the websites that come to my mind when I say listen 2.0 are wikipedia and some of the applications that google develop for the users, in the wikipedia case it's important to know how a big group of users can write and correct every line of the content published, making these wikipedia website with web 2.0 one of the most complete online encyclopedias.

These new ways of online user interactions are modifying the web, making it more friendly and keeping it always optional aftermarket.

Cheers,

Alex

Long Week

Here im in vacations in surfers paradise, have a good day.

Cheers, Alex.

Project A - Week 7

Project A, One of the first questions that came to my mind before writing the first word of code was, what am I going to write about in my website? There are lots of possible subjects. The final idea came very fast; I am in Australia as an exchange student reason why I decided to focus in my biggest hobby "travelling".

I have been studying in México programming for two yea

rs, that could maybe explain why my website is using some tools we haven't seen yet in class, like JavaScript and some other features of HTML.

In my home university I used to make websites using HTML with tables and styles, now in Australia I learned is a big mistake, but I’m always open for new ways of coding, that's why I want to learn more CSS before I go back.

One of the main ideas for my website is that I wanted it to be easy for navigation, that's why the menu on the top can show the different sections on the site, it is divided in

eight pages and one index. The scroll was made in JavaScript, I prefer using JavaScript instead of flash for this kind of navigation options because I consider myself an old school programmer, everyday I see that programming is becoming less important that how it used to be before, and the reason is because the actual software is almost doing most of the coding part.

On the index part I decided to show a mashup that show

s a yahoo map with some of the pictures I have taken in different parts of the world, this mashup was made in yahoo pipes, it works extracting the pictures from the flickr server ID, all these photos are geo tagged, which makes easier for the mashup to identify the spots.

I have to say that I am new on this thing about mashups and APIS, but after a couple days trying over and over again, finally worked!

One of the things I didn’t found about mashups is how to give them format and style, when I inserted it on my website it looks like if it wasn’t part of it.

There is another section on the menu called America, which is a complete JavaScript animation that makes a square to move every time the user clicks on one of the options showed below. In this section I took a list of flags from Google and one picture from every country, so when the user clicks on the signal next to the flag the window hides and another window with the information of the country comes out, one of the effects of the window is that when it finishes moving it makes a slight rebound that gives a more natural effect.

In the other sections which are named as continents, and the subsections named as countries I decided to add some of the pictures I have taken during some of my trips, excepting Asia which is in the list the only section where the pictures where taken from other sources.

I decided to upload the project in the server of one website I was making before because I don’t trust very much on the free hosting websites, and if I have the chance of using a normal server, I will.

Finishing this project gave me a big satisfaction, because of all the hours I dedicated for making all the code and functions, and when I test the site and it was working correctly, trust me feels very good.

Alex.

Week 6 Carving Up The World

Another week, more things to learn.

This week we saw some stuff related to patterns (conventions), internet lacks and limitations, some concepts like ontology, taxonomy, hierarchy, folksonomy and categories.

When we are using the internet we never think about those thing called "conventions" that make our navigation easily, and the reason is very simple we don't pay enough attention.

When we visit almost any website clicking on the different sections and we want to go back home, we just click on the logo located on the top left.

Why is in the top left and not in the top right? Because of conventions, all of this "rules" have been established for making our experience on the internet easily.

But these rules don't mean that there is some "rules guy" writing how thing must be working, is because with the time people has been adapting their costumes when navigating to the easiest way possible.

We can also remember some of the concepts given in class, Ontology: "The study of that which is", Taxonomy:"Dividing up the world into chunks", Hierarchy:"Normally implying hierarchies", Categories:"As thing that are placed into categories", Folksonomy:"Another approach compared with taxonomy".

We also learned how to identify the different components on a "Machine Tag", like the namespace:predicate=value; the value can be repeated in different machine tags because the differences can be identified with the predicate or the namespace.

"Ontology is Overrated"

Cheers, Alex.

No Lecture- Reflection Week

During this week I had chance to analize some of the topics we have been studying in this unit, was an important break for me because of all the content we have been learning.

We also had to read a couple of websites with topics related to the media production.

The first (http://blue-anvil.com/archives/guide-to-semantic-mark-up/) is a guide to semantic Mark-up, which is basically a short guide that explains the correct way of spelling the HTML code, in this guide I found very interesting examples of the possible mistakes that we can make when writing the code.

One of the best examples I found is that when I want to render the text in bold I always use and here they

explain that the correct way of rendering bold letters is , I also have to say that some of the other examples I already know them like the css uppercase modification and the title modification.

The blockquote example was also new for me because before knowing this spell, i used to make a table with a copuple of columns, writing the blockquote on the right column and giving styles with css, I have to say that is awsome to learn some different ways of writing code.

The second website (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_in_Australia)

contains some of the steps that the government have been taking during these years with censoring some websites.

In the text they explain that the first reason why they wanted to censor some of the internet content is because few children where having access to pornographic content, but this was just the first reason, during the next years they began to add new modifications

on the censoring law, dividing the categories in two:

Mandatory censored websites and Optional censored websites.

On the mandatory censored websites are all the children pornographic websites, and some other random illegal websites, and on the Optional censored websites are some of the 18+ content.

In my opinion the government should be worried of some other stuff, instead of trying to be like the "father" of a society in which residents should have the rights to decide which content they want to have online.

I can say that this kind of online censoring laws the only thing that they are creating is to make Australia similar to these Asian "no freedom" countries.

Cheers.

Mashups and Apis

Uff, after this lecture everything I thought I leaned about web is now just confusion.

Mashups, programming, apis (application programming interface), oh my good no more code please!!

One of the things that I'm learning during this time in Australia is how different could be the way of making websites around the world, this study abroad semester is one of the best opportunities to explore and learn about how the things specifically websites are made here.

For example, in Mexico we also use css and html, but the css styles we use are just to give format to all the texts inside the website, because for design purposes we use the html making tables and trying to make it look as better as possible.

Something that I've found here is that css is more than text format, with the css you can modify completely the design of a website. One of my principal objectives on this semester is learn as much as possible about css, so that when I return to Mexico I wil

l teach my mates the benefits of using css on web design.

About mashups the only thing i've learned already is that you can make awesome stuff just knowing how to apply it. The demo websites that the lecturer showed us are incredibly nice, they show a new interactive way of making websites.

I hope during the next weeks I will learn more about this Mashups and Apis to use them on future websites to design.

Cheers.

Third Week

Hi there, here i'm writing again. This time I want to say that I really enjoyed this week tutorial.

During this week I learned new ways of writing html, and basically not (How to meet Ladies) haha. I want to say also that I have been studying html and other programming languages for two years, so I consider myself a big fan of programming techniques :-).

In this week we began hmtl from the basics, I consider that the tutorial was very good, sometimes I think that to learn this programming languages is always important to practice everything you learn when you go back home, because it doesn't matter how good your lecturer could be, if you don't practice enough you will forget everything.

During this week tutorial, we had to write some of the ideas we have for our first project, and do it on html. I have some ideas about making a slideshow of some of the best pictures I have taken during my trips, and add some of the experiences behind all of those pictures, but as I said is just an idea, just matter of time to decide!.

Cheers, alex.

Networked Media production First Post

Hey! So this is my first official post, I'm exchange student, so during this semester I will try to improve my english as much as possible, and writing this is a very good way to practice. I also want to invite everyone to visit my other blog "One Mexican In Australia"

http://mexicanoenaustralia.blogspot.com/

I want to make some comments about my NMP class. During this week I found very interesting everything they said about blogs and how are they changing the way the people express themselves around the world, and now every person who has access to internet can write about any topic, and any person can stop you to do it (They also spoke about the censorship ) how some countries like North Korea or China restrict the content of the websites. I will never support this kind of actions that are just covering any information that we all have the right to visit.

Last week they spoke about the world wide web, and one of the main languages on it HTML and all the way before developing it. In my home university i'm studying programming in some of my units, and that is the reason why this reading was very interesting for me. On the reading named "Information Managment, a proposal" they explain step by step the process of creating a new programming language, but the best thing is that the author write the needs of the language he was creating and after that he writes how he solved every problem.

First Post

First Post

cheers