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 5 - Working on Project A

MorBCN on Flikr (08/12/2008) Some rights reserved

We had no lecture this week, but in our tutorials, Max encouraged us to concentrate on our Production Project A, which is due in Week 7. I'm comfortable with the direction my Online Exhibition is heading in. I've been researching Antoni Gaudi's background and obviously i'm going to fill my Blog with plenty of pictures and text but i'm also looking at including some cool videos of some of his work's locations. For example the Sagrada Famiglia, north of Barcelona City. Check out the following video of the Sagrada Famiglia. I also want to focus on the effect his work has had on Barcelona's tourism.

-Sean

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

Week 3 - HTML & CSS

Jesper Rønn-Jensen on Flickr (05/01/07) Some rights reserved

This week's Lecture with Nathan McGuinness focused on HTML and CSS, which i vaguely knew about but hardly understood. We learnt that HTML is pretty simple to write and because it's the first step in website creation it's important to understand it, even though applications like Dreamweaver take away a lot of the hassle and do it for you. We started off by learning some important terminology - what HTML actually stood for: Hyper Text Markup Language and some popular tags including 'p' for Paragraph and 'img' for Image. I won't go into too much more detail, but i'm glad i learnt exactly what HTML was and how it contributes to website creation. We also learnt briefly about XML or Extensible Markup Language which is basically HTML using further describing language.

Brajeshwar on Flickr (14/08/06) Some rights reserved

I wanted to put relevant pictures/links in my Blog this week so i searched Flickr for some HTML jokes, if you're interested there's a page of them from a Danish web-developer at Justaddwater. In the Tutorial with Nathan we made a website from scratch using HTML and CSS. It was called 'Ice Cream Lab Sandwiches' and we built it from basic HTML and then added CSS files to change the appearance and make the site look a little more interesting. It was quite interesting to build it completely from scratch and it showed me how important it is to get the HTML perfect because if there's even one word slightly mispelt or incorrectly placed, the whole thing just won't work. I'm starting to think about my Project A and i think i'm leaning towards doing an Information Flow for Facebook, but we'll see how that goes.

-Sean

Week 2 - Blogs

Afternoon all,

Our Lecture this week was all about Blogs by Nathan McGuinnes, another member of Ice Lab. Although i already knew a bit about Blogs, icertainly didn't realise how popular they were. I also learnt about RSS Feeds. Speaking as someone that views a few diferrent blogs daily, it certainly saves a lot of time being able to scroll down one page to see which ones have been updated. I use Google Reader as a platform to check all my RSS feeds. I was apprehensive at first about writing my own blog, because i wasn't sure if i'd run out of things to say and the fact that several people might read it, but being able to post a few things i'm interested in has made it a bit easier.

This week we had our first Tutorial for Networked Media Production. Our tutor Max (who is the third person from Ice Lab) basically showed us a bunch of really cool Internet sites and we shared sites that we were interested in. We also focused on blogs. It was interesting that most, if not all the people in the tutorial were regular users of Facebook and a lot of people had Blogs. I'm a very regular Facebook user and i read several different blogs but this is my first ever Blog and although it's i'm used to it now, i didn't know what to expect.

I'm a regular viewer of Digg.com, but i also check out a few different sites on a daily basis including: College Humour which is this great American production company that started off on YouTube and daily posts skits and a few other things they find funny.

Trip Advisor is a great blog that people can post Travel advice and stories from around the world. I found it really useful when i travelled around Europe and their forums are really helpful too. I like to keep up to date with what's happening in the U.K. as i lived their briefly and i have friends over there, so i like The Guardian website as it's probably one of the more credible newspapers in the U.K. I also view the Sydney Morning Herald website on a daily basis.

Since today, i've picked up a few others from the Lecture and Tutorial. One of them that i'll be checking daily from now on is Gizmodo. It's a great Aussie Gadget guide with plenty of cool Gadget news as well as news, videos and pictures. My opinions of Blogs has changed over the past few days because although i used to regularly check various blogs, i've certainly been discovering several other cool ones.

-Sean

Week 1

By: cambodia4kidsorg on Flikr (11/10/2006) Some rights reserved.

Hi everyone :-)

Our first Lecture for Networked Media was done by Michael Honey from Ice Lab (a Canberra based Design Studio). Apart from a standard Introduction to the course, including assesment, expectations etc. Michael Honey talked about one of the most major media network: The Internet. I realised even more how Facebook, MySpace, Google and blogs etc. are making the Internet even more popular and powerful, with people using these forms of communication veen more than ever.

I found it really interesting when Michael focused briefly on where the Internet all began, including various diagrams and pictures showing what the Internet used to look and Barner's-Lee original proposal for the Internet.

All in all, I'm looking forward to studying this unit as i've always been highly interested in the different types of media and communication, as well as production. I've never done a Blog before, but i do view several on a daily basis. One that i find really interesting is Digg.com which i was referred to by a friend from the U.K. basically stories are ranked according to how many 'diggs' they recieve from users. They also have a pretty cool Vodcast that i watch weekly. This is one of the funny videos 'dugg' that i noticed this past week- It's by the same people that did 'Jizz in my Pants' - I'm on a Boat - The Lonely Island.

-Sean