Week 7 - Almost there!

By: Thomas Broome. Featured on Kottke (7/4/09)

First of all, sorry about the corny title, i was going to have 'The Final Climb', so be thankful! Really i was aiming to reflect this cool picture i found, in the title of this weeks blog post. Anyway...In our final week of classes before holidays we worked on our Project A piece of assessment. Although i had a bit to go, i was confident what was left would be completed during our final tutorial. Really my main difficulty was working out exactly how much material to include, but i thought i would make it more of a visual exhibition rather than textual because what Gaudi had to show was the most important part (even though i have included a lot of text). Although I will be making a few tweaks here and there before i submit, take a look and feel free to comment on my Production Project A, a blog exhibiting Spanish architect Antoni Gaudi's life and most important works:

http://antonigaudi1926.blogspot.com/

By: ticon0 on Flikr (2/12/07) Some rights reserved.

Check this out - it's a Steam powered Ipod charger. Apparently it's based on the same motor that's used to power certain Lego models. Check out the video and follow my links if you feel like reading more about it.

Week 6: Carving up the world

By: Sebastian Prooth on Flikr (6/12/06) Some rights reserved.

This week, Michael Honey gave us a really interesting lecture: 'Carving up the world'. What grabbed my attention was when he spoke about the limitations of the Internet. The internet is lacking in the types of structures or default conventions that are oh so familiar in our everyday 'physical' worlds. This is a hurdle for the Internet because it something that humans learn from other humans and then it just becomes normal - it is hard to mirror this in technology because there are so many different possibilities online. This was how i understood it anyway, so hopefully this makes sense to everyone else!

In the Tutorial, as with the last couple of weeks, we worked on our Production Project. As i've said in previous posts, i've chose to do an Online exhibition about Antoni Gaudi, a Spanish architect. I wish i had of given myself more time to refine my research on Gaudi as well as refining the finished product but because of all my other assesment, i've put this last - i'll just have to devote more time to it in this final week before it's due. I've found it a really fun assignment (if there is such a thing) because i've been able to reminice about my trip to Barcelona and learn about something (architecture/art) that i normally would be far too lazy to immerse myself in. In other words, thankfully the assignment hasn't been too arduous.

By: xn44 on Flikr (13/4/2008) Some rights reserved.

I'm still quite unsure exactly what the tutors expect from us (not that they havn't been massively helpful, because they have) because i've noticed other people's work which seems to be a lot more thought out and attractive than mine and they certainly seem to be going to a lot more effort. Nathan did tell me i'm on the right track so i guess i should just stop worrying!

Now to finish off this blog post, here is something totally unrelated and very bizarre that i found off a blog i follow - Boing Boing. Apparently there is a new trend of 'Crushed Smartie' smoking - with kids! I'll let you watch it...

Week 4 - Remix, API, Mashup

Remix, API and Mashup - something that meant absolutely nothing to me before this week. Although i was familiar with HTML, XML and CSS - i was certainly unsure of what Remix, API and Mashup involved. Luckily this was all explained quite well in Max Wheeler's lecture on the subject. Application Programming Interface (API) which is basically a bunch of functions that you can interact and manipulate within the data of an application. It's a good way to see what other people can do with what you created. Mashups basically combine services using the different API's of those services. Max showed us a bunch of examples of API's and Mashups. They were really cool, especially one created from the Twitter API - Twistori. It basically shows all the posts displaying the words: Love, Hate, Think, Believe, Feel and Wish in real time. Also, while searching for some videos about API's i found a cool Google Earth API on YouTube and an overview of YouTube's API and Tools

publikaccion.es on Flickr (29/06/08) Some rights reserved

As i mentioned last week, i had settled on doing an Information Flow for my Project A, but since chatting about each option during our Tutorial i've completely changed my mind and am going to focus on curating an Online exhibition. My subject - Antoni Gaudi. I'm not an art critic or an expert of architecture, but when i recently travelled to Barcelona i learnt a lot about his work and saw a lot of it too. I look forward to creating something that really shows his works off.

During the Tutorial with Nathan we further discussed API's, looked at different examples and started working on our own Pipes. What are Pipes? Pipes are basically an application that you can mashup, manipulate and aggregate different content online. It's a service offered through Yahoo and i initially found it wuite difficult, but after watching a few starter videos i got the hang of it.

-Sean