Reflective Meta Post

The content of my blog this semsester had been very course and personal interest related, the content ranges from youtubes to movie reviews to mma news and finishes with course content and reflections on things such as the semantic web and my semester 2 assignment. It's intended audience would really be people who are doing the course that are interested in the same things I am and this is reflected by the traffic that has been recorded by the opinion polls in my blog. these ask readers who their favorite fighter is or what their opinion is on a current movie.

I have created networked media content for both assignments linked them to this site, as well as including and adding links to other blogs and youtubes that reader may find interesting. the traffic on this blog is really limited by it's audience which would have to be doing this course or interested in my hobbies to get anything out of it. It was created to demonstrate to viewers my involvement with the course and my understanding of the topic in it.

I nominate the Semantic Web, Data Visualization and My Assignment posts as my 3 on topic blogs and hope that they show my understanding of these topics.

My Assignment

For the second assignment for this networked media unit i have decided to abandon my plan to do a data visualization as I think that I will do much better the Geo Tag assignment which requires the telling of a narrative through pictures accompanyed by text. This seems much more my style as it requires more creative work and less technical prowess with computer programs that the data visualiseation task that would probly require the use of flash and other such programes.

I have decided to create a blog that functions as a carrier of the story map that I have created it will ahve background information on main characters and places that are important to the narrative i will also try to create a story line branch to make the story even more interactive this should make it much more interesting. If possible i would also like to include a You tube that illustrates the text in one chapter so that I have come up with others way to tell the story. Having audio would also be nice, but licensing and actually finding some that can be imbedded (which has proved impossible) would have taken more time that I was allowed due top other assignments.

Web 2.0

the lecture on web 2.0 was very odd, the 2.0 web seems to be seen as very ambitious. even the choice of 2.0 refers to a great advance over 1.0 it suggests that it will be the next step in the evolution of the net, this however may not be the case. i was much more impressed by the idea of the semantic web because the web 2.0 just seams to be a shift from static to live and user generated content. it represents a more community driven and user influenced experience on the web - Wikipedia is an example of the web 2.0 where the content is user generated and monitored and updated and only the application is not manipulable. things such as blogs will also add to the web 2.0 with live real time news entering the blog sphere and causing the evolution and communication based advance of the internet.

Data visuals

The lecture on data visualization was very interesting it seems that data visualizations are as the name suggests visualisations of data, these have many advantages. one being that they are more entertaining and appealing to the viewer and thus beneficial in attaining one of the only physical scarcitys of the internet, Attention. it also can be helpful in exposing trends and patterns that are not immediatly identifyable in the raw data or numbers. they also look very cool with the data being able to take on many forms and can be used uniquely for example a band interested with global warming could have themselves appear in a music clip as animated clipings of data gathered on the crisis.

I decided against doing the data visualization assignment because for me it seems far more difficult and has less freedom that the geo0 tag assignment which is reminiscent of the wolfen Flickr Api that was shown to us in an earlier lecture.

Semantic web

Semantics is the study of meaning in communication, so this lecture on the semantic web was suggesting that the semantic web would be the evolving for of the current world wide web, making the web capable of understanding your interests and browsing habbits and being able to tailor it's searches and focus to bring you informantion and products of a similar nature. It would be able to do this by being able to gather information about information and data about data, this would result in a understanding and responsive web that could read web pages that previously are only readable by humans and then would be able to search for other simmilar sites.

the semantic web would involve publishing in machine and human readable language like Xml this is similar to OOP or object orientated programing and is the basis for the semantic web.

Movies

Eagle eye... I saw this movie last week with friends and our thoughts on this movie were mixed. a while ago I blogged about another movie I had gone to see which i was really impressed with, Taken which I have already described in previous posts is a very typical action movie however it is really entertaining and was well worth the money and time. Eagle eye however isnt as impressive, it starts with a typical action movie premise and ends up some mutated cross between I robot and paycheck. while not being spectacular it was at least entertaining and if you were really bored and had nothing better to do this movie probably would not seem so lack luster. Eagle eye was probably a 6 out of 10 and i went into it with low expectations after reading online reviews, and expecting to only be entertained for a couple of hours. Billy bob thorton acted well and so did sheia lebueff but I thought that the other acters in it were a bit average in their preformances. The ovies main fault was the ending - after taking two bullets and seemingly dieing on the floor sheia lebueffs characters through some miracle surivives and goes onto recive the gratitude of the millitary thus destroying the sacrifice for the greater good feeling that the movie strove to get from the previous 15 minutes of the film.