Well this is it, my last Networked Media Production blog post. Looking back, it has been fun. There is a lot of stuff here I never would have thought about if not for this course. Although I don’t think many people ever saw this blog, at the moment I have two followers and since you can’t leave comments here I have no idea what people did and did not like about what I have done. Anyway in this final post I am supposed to nominate my best three for assessment, and they are;
- “First of all…”, my very first blog post. Ever. And this is the reason I chose it - to show where I was in the beginning.
- “Multiplicity” because it links to some good sites which also happen to be relevant to what I’m saying.
- “Data Visualisation”: for best video link (at least as far as being in any way related to what I was writting about is concerned).
In writting this series I have tried to articulate my thoughts about the course and it’s content, but also to share some things that I just thought was interesting (if not always relevant). But this has been good. I hope the units I take in the future will be this interesting. Even fun.
It’s been good talking to you, but that’s all from me.
Before I start go to http://maps.google.com.au/maps/ms?ie=UTF8&hl=en&msa=0&msid=109050286852100770766.00046b057dd77708a9420&ll=-32.921097,151.78432&spn=0.02165,0.04519&z=15 to see the assignment.
Just like the last assignment I was given three options, and just like last time I opted for what I thought would be easiest. In this case it was the geo-narrative. I didn’t want to make a youtube video and I wouldn’t know where to begin with the data visualisation. To me, the geo-narrative presented an obvious way to go about it. I would simply take photographs around my home town (Newcastle) and supplement my portfolio of images with whatever relevant (and properly licensed) pictures I could find on www.flickr.com
The first step I took was to take the photos. This wasn’t a problem for me. When I went home for the mid-semester break I spent some time driving around town with a camera. Now I see that this should have been done only after I had figured out what to write. But I only had limited time back home to take the photos and I figured I could just make something up with them later. That turned out to be a bit harder than I thought. I had a bunch of disconnected images and a bad case of writers block. But I eventually came up with something, I just wish it was better.
So, once it was written I had to get another image. I typed Creative Commons into google and came to a site that filters out what I could and could not use. I was looking for a picture of the Pasha Bulker (that ship that crashed onto Nobby’s Beach, Newcastle a couple of years ago. You may or may not remember, it was on the news and everything). What I found was an image entitled “Ship Wreck at Nobby’s Beach Newcastle Australia” by A.Connah
I also had to edit a couple of the photos I took myself. I just did this in photoshop by adding the “Find Edges” filter. That was pretty simple and so was putting it all together in Google Maps, after I had set up a google account.
As humans we are pretty bad at comprehending things on a massive scale. We are better at understanding pictures. That is why “Data Visualisation” is such a useful tool. Basically, data visualisation is the conversion of large amounts of data (i.e. numbers) into simple graphics and/or animations which still convey the same information but in a way that is more meaningful to us. The video I have posted below is a good example, but also the “Oakland Crime Map” which shows what crimes were committed where in Oakland. They may appear to be totally different to each other, but in a way they are similar, in that both are designed to show us what, otherwise we would have a difficult time understanding and in a way that keeps our attention (where a page of numbers fails).
(If your marking this click here to view second half of this post. If your just reading this on the page with every post I’ve ever written, ignore this message-the next bit of the post is right below)
This weeks lecture was a pretty big concept to get around. Multiplicity means “Many-ness” (is that a real word or did I just make it up?… Doesn’t matter).
Anyway the analogy given to help understand this was a story featuring Francis Galton, the guy who invented eugenics. Francis went to the local fair where he came across a contest to guess the weight of a cow. After the contest he decided to have a look at the guesses people had submitted and found that while no individual guess was right, the average of all the guesses was very close indeed. The point I’m trying to make is that sometimes there is wisdom in a crowd, and that is what multiplicity is about.
This sort of ties in with the Web 2.0 thing, the “democratisation” of the internet and an opening up in the sharing of information. But I think more to the point of multiplicity are sites that are built on alot of people doing a little bit. For example http://www.fmylife.com/ & http://imsobadatsex.com/ which are basically for people to confess some little shame of their’s in a few lines. Relevant and funny-do check them out. I mention these because “Mulitiplicity” is about a more efficient way to do things, and for these types of sites it works well because its not such a huge effort on the part of any one person. But if it was then it would be extremely difficult to maintain.
First week back from the class free period, and the topic is “Web 2.0”. Before the lecture on it I had never heard the term “Web 2.0”, but now I think I got the gist of it.
Web 2.0 is a percieved new generation in web sites and the way they are designed. For example the old way of building a website (Web 1.0), would involve, lets say a company of some sort, creating a THEIR page which contains THIER information or products or whatever. And the objective of all this is the make people visit and stay on that site so the company in question can sell more products or advertising space, et cetera. To me this sounds like an old kind of business model, much like TV, radio and newspapers (but it is a model that works). Web 2.0 is more user generated content and people talking to each other rather than a company broadcasting to the masses. That’s the main difference as far as I can tell. Things like social networking sites are examples of Web 2.0.
First thing, to see the assignment go to;
http://rapidshare.de/files/46600208/Production_Project_A.docx.html
and click on “Free” and follow the prompts. I’m sorry that I didn’t make that more straight forward but I don’t know how to create a web page. What I did was upload the document with “RapidShare”
For this assignment I was given three options. I could critique a website, or set up an online exhibition, or build a reference page on some current topic. I chose the first. Why? Because I thought it would be the easiest, because I know how to look up a website. Whereas I have no experience in or knowledge on building my own website.
So the first step was, obviously, to select a site to critique. The suggestions provided included social networking sites and on-line shopping. I thought it best to stick to what I know. As I don’t have anything like a MySpace or face book account, on-line shopping seemed the best way to go. Given my recent experience of buying a new desktop and laptop from Dell, Dell.com was the perfect candidate.
Having decided on what to do, the next step was to go to www.dell.com and begin doing some research. This involved mostly going through the process of buying a laptop from Dell (minus the part where I commit to actually making the purchase), and charting out what I did on a piece of scrap paper. These notes comprised of several flow charts which I later integrated with each other (using the drawing options in Microsoft Word 2007) to form the diagram as seen above. The diagram is a simplified version of the information flow on the Dell website, which for my purposes deals only with the buying process. This was an example given in class of what we could do for the diagram; ( URL http://farm1.static.flickr.com/24/58299511_2bcff18db2.jpgwww.dell.com and begin doing some research. This involved mostly going through the process of buying a laptop from Dell (minus the part where I commit to actually making the purchase), and charting out what I did on a piece of scrap paper. These notes comprised of several flow charts which I later integrated with each other (using the drawing options in Microsoft Word 2007) to form the diagram as seen above. The diagram is a simplified version of the information flow on the Dell website, which for my purposes deals only with the buying process. This was an example given in class of what we could do for the diagram; ( URL http://farm1.static.flickr.com/24/58299511_2bcff18db2.jpg)
This is a diagram for flickr, a photo sharing website. As you can see it is quite different to the diagram I drew for Dell. The reason for this is the flickr diagram covers a more diverse range of the applications on flickr. Whereas mine was the outline of a single process and thus took a more linear approach.
The task put to me by the assignment was to diagram the information flow of the site and to critique the way Dell handled it. With particular attention to; user login, comparison to similar sites, why they did what they did and how improvements could be made.
I’ll start with “user login”. Here I think people are put into two distinct categories: those who already have an account and those who don’t. How are they treated differently? This was easy enough to find out. As I already have an account on Dell.com I simply logged into it. I had forgotten my password and so selected the “Forgot Your Password?” option. Here I was asked to enter my e-mail address, and the password was sent there. Having retrieved my password I could now log in. I then had to find out what happened to people who don’t have an account already set up. All I had to do was click on the “Register” button and fill out a form (comprised of three questions name, e-mail address and password). When done here click on “Create an Account”. However as an alternative to registering an account the was an option to bypass all of this and “Sign in as Guest” which just means you can still buy something but it will be impossible to save your bills and shipping information as you don’t have an account to save it to or an e-mail address to send it.
Throughout the assignment I tried to integrate the critique, comparison to other sites and where they could improve. This is why I wrote at length on the “Customise and Buy” section. For the critique and suggested improvements bit, I know I didn’t have much to offer, but it was useful for comparison to the apple website. Lucky for me, apple was the first other website I looked at, and coincidently it had a similar set up to Dell. It was also a good opportunity to discuss some of the aspects on why Dell made the decisions that it did in terms of the website. I wrote a little bit on the help options, which ties in with the user friendliness part later on under the sub-heading “User Interface”. The “User Interface” section was my attempt to demonstrate the importance of simplicity in terms of the flow of information to the user. I found the best way to do this was by contrast to another site which (at least in my opinion) was poorly designed. Convenient, because this allowed me to answer further the criteria of discussing information flow and comparison to other websites.
And so, that’s how I put the assignment together and why I did what I did. As I mentioned in the conclusion I know that it wasn’t much of a critique because there isn’t much there to critisise. All I can conclude is that, for it’s purpose, Dell.com is a very good website.
