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.