Inspiration for my images and further research…

You can find the inspiration for my images here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vrpmr8wM78Q

It is a government campaign to raise awareness for responsible drinking!

Some further reading on topics previously mentioned in this blog.

Digitisation in the music industry:- Further proof that the music industry was slow to react to digitisation. The article also gives a brief history of the music industry and notes all the technologial landmarks.

Internet ‘snooping’:- One of the founders of the World Wide Web disagrees with the way companies are building up profiles of our consumer habits by profiling us on the internet.

Data visualisation:- is explained and demonstrated here.

Steve – O

LIVE Artifact

Hello bloggers.

I have made my final artifact live. You can find it at http://www.geocities.com/stephen_jamie_kerr@ymail.com/index.html

Enjoy!

Steve-O

Reflection of the Artifact!

We were asked to make a few artefact’s using various pieces of software as part of Convergent Media Practice. The final artifact I am making is a website using XHTML, CSS, and Flash. (I think thats it). It is to hold my images you may have seen from artifact one, which is a visualised piece of data from my personal life.

First up was getting used to photoshop, I had never used this program before, after getting used to it, I was editing images on a basic level. I enjoyed doctoring photos with it.

Here’s a pic that I doctored, it is a famous Fatboy slim album cover, I put my slightly rotund friends face on it.

An image I edited using Photoshop

Next up we got to grips with Dreamweaver, as I have studied computing and software development at college, I found this relatively straightforward.  All though as I was a developer at college, and not a designer, I was used to editing web pages using code.

Next up was Flash. It was this little b*gger that took me the longest amount of time to get my head around. We used it to make a flash slide show to insert into a website.

After some time and effort and a play around with the Flash editor, I got used to it a little. It is a very tedious piece of software to use, if you want to apply the simplest effect to your slide show, it can become a bit a chore (considering I have 15 images in my slide show).

Steve-O

Next level technology!

I did not attend this final lecture because I was trying to get my head round Flash movies. I will try to reflect on the uploaded information instead!

Technology is now being developed called CaveUT that allows users to experience an illusion of a complete 3D environment! Sick, imagine using this technology to play Grant Theft Auto!

The fictional technology demonstrated in many sci-fi Hollywood movies is becoming a thing of reality as Ubiquitous computing develops.

The Semantic Web is allowing web pages to be developed that needs little or no input from humans to allow a desired effect. It opens up the Internet to (again) make it easily accessible.

I do believe that’s a full set of lecture reflections! 😉

Over and out

Steve – O

Web 2.0…(AGAIN)

We again went over the development of the internet on the 3rd of March. The world started with what was later coined as “Web 1.0”, this was a basic set of internet application that worked ‘top down’ and used mainlythe easy to learn fault tollerant HTML language. Web 1.0 had static pages with framesets and not much interaction, maybe a guestbook if you were lucky.

Web 2.0 has dynamically created pages sorted into cattogries with tags. RSS allows us information to come to us, rather than checking several websites for updated information. Blogging and social networking has become standard.

What will Web 3.0 bring us?  Experts belive it will allow even quicker access to information. Search engines will function with us typing in complex sentences rather than a couple of keywords. Imagine “I want to go to the cinema in Coventry, then eat Pizza afterwards, then get a bus home.” Apperently Web 3.0 will collect the results and organise them for us!

Browsers will become even more intelligent, and learn its users interests, meaning we wont need to give search engines as much information!

http://computer.howstuffworks.com/web-30.htm

Note to lecturers! We haven’t covered Web 3.0 so I want some extra marks! 😀

Steve – O

It happened after Nineteen Eighty-Four…

An excerpt from the Wiki for Orwells famous novel…

“In the society that Orwell describes, everyone is under complete surveillance by the authorities”

Last weeks lecture (10/02/2009) about surveillance in the networked world held some striking similarities with Orwells Big Brother theory.

We discussed the term Sousveillance, a term invented by Steve Mann to ‘describe the recording of an activity from an individuals perspective by wearing a video recording device, which is then streamed live on the net’.

We then talked about inverse surveillance, which means surveillance from the bottom up, and how this type of surveillance can be used to watch over authority figures.

Companies are able to track everything we look at or take part in over the Internet. They are then able to build up complex files about our consumer tastes and sell that information.

Social networking has now opened the door for employers to take note of how you behave in social situation. Considering most of the pictures on Facebook profiles are taken on nights out, I hardly see how this can be fair.

Social networking is now being used by police to hunt down criminals.

If I say one profound thing in my life, let it be this:-

“It’s scary times that we are living in”.

Note – It’s probably already been said!

SK

History of the World Wide Web….zZzZzZz

Sorry to say but this lecture (03 Feb 2009) was as boring as it sounds.

I have not encountered a time line since doing my SAT exams in year 6.  There was alot of material to digest in this lecture. The fact that an idea that was not disimilar from the technology we celebrate today was first express in 1945 by Vannaver Bush was rather brow raising.

The first hypertext browsing device was created in the 60s and evolved into the internet and world wide web as we know it today.

It’s funny how the idea for a revolutionary technology was first thought of in the 1930’s, and it has took until recent years to ‘boom’. I couldn’t imagine life without it.

On the other hand it would be nice to go home and just switch off, without the compulsive thought of checking facebook, email, various forums and RSS news feeds.

I would love to breakdown every little fact that was thrown at us, but I switched off, it was a difficult topic to take in.

However you can read the blog that was on the big screen if you wish to read up on the subject.

SK

I promise to be more enthusiastic next week.

Music is my ting…

The lecture given on 27th January 2009 about convergence and the music industry was more enjoyable than previous lectures as it is more relevant to my chosen course.

The lecture covered digitisation and how it has affected the music industry. The music industry really needs to change with the times, the slow reaction to change allowed Apple to become a new major player in the music business.

Most interesting fact revealed at this lecture was the secret meeting between the big four record companies and Napster. I think the big four shot themselves in the foot with regards to the way they dealt with this ‘problem’ that had arised.

Technology is not a problem! If any industry is slow to react to changing technologies, they will fall on their arse!

CD’s sales continue to fall, Zavvi is in trouble, its hard to find and buy a tangible single release these days. I think its time to rethink your business models Mr. Record Industry boss.

Oh and another thing, if I ever have to sit through the Microsoft Songsmith advert again I will scratch my own eyes out.

SK

Artifact 1 – A Messy Night Out

Bonjour

This is my first artifact. Enjoy.

Note: Apologies for the picture quality, first time using photoshop to shrink my massive 12 megapixel images, sure the slideshow gets across the message though.

SK

Just incase your browser does not allow links to open in other windows, click me, other wise, copy and paste this:-

show/with/3219021058/

Do you know what a mash-up is?

Most student’s would say it is the state of mind after a heavy one, some would say it’s a type of remix, the latter being correct. A mash-up is when you collect two pieces of data, form them together and create something new! That’s not all I learnt at our previous lecture (20th of Jan 2009), read on…

Again we learnt about web 2.0 and how it affects us. We then got shown a clever clever website called wefeelfine.org. A truly great piece of technology.

It searches the thousands and thousands of blogs created on the internet daily that have been created by users, generating content. It searches for people who are expressing their feeling. E.g I feel hungover. I feel overworked. I feel like I want to kick slow walking people in the back of the head. I feel like old women who sit on the bus with me on the way to University have nothing better to do than moan about the weather, the volume of my iPod touch and ‘that new foreign kebab shop creating traffic problems in my area’.

We also got told what our first piece of work is, I am looking forward to visualising a statistic of my day to day life. I am not a design student so this is a welcome break from writing reports on organisational culture or the stupid leisure industry.

Most interesting comment the lecturer gave to me…After the first plane hit on that terror attack on the world trade centre – cannot remember the date for the life of me  😉 – All air traffic was grounded for 36 hours. Many people in the USA commented on how clear and blue the sky had been.

We also got shown some of Chris Jordan’s work of visualising data. Big huge high quality images of millions of small artifacts such as oil barrel used in America every two minutes etc. 

Anyway, well over my word count, hope I don’t get marked down for it. Trying to cram in a whole lecture in two hundred words aint easy you know!

Don’t eat yellow snow.

Steve-O