No Lecture

Just putting the finishing touches on my project at the moment. Im pretty happy with were the project is heading at the moment, and the music I chose sounds great. as the clip was very short however I had to loop the entire song, but it sounds ok. I don't think that it sounds repetitive.

No lecture

Just working on the production project this week. Haven’t got much further visually since last week, but I did find some audio that I’m going to use in the piece. The license is to be used for educational purposes only, and being that this is a project for my university studies I feel I am quite qualified.

The license agreement is as follows-

RoyaltyFreeMusic.com offers a diverse set of free royalty free music clips that can be used, without limitation, in Educational, student and personal, not-for-profit projects, free of charge.
* This does not include professional charities or non profits that pay administrative salaries.
The free royalty free music clips on this special page change regularly and can be downloaded by Educators, students and individuals looking for high quality background music, production music, to use in their projects.
The royalty free music clips and free music clips on this page change frequently and represent many different musical genres with varying instrumentation. Free royalty free music clips in the classical and light jazz vein will add the needed touch when used as background music for personal websites or production music in educational videos, while free clips in progressive styles such as Hip-Hop and rock and roll can add flair as production music for film or television productions at educational facilities.
These free royalty free clips have been composed and performed by the same talented artists and musicians that work on all the tracks at Royalty Free Music.com. The instrumentation of these free music clips include resonant strings and woodwinds, powerful brass and even electric guitar, keyboards and exotic percussion instruments, and will give any project a unique and professional sound.
The music clips that appear on this page are rotated and changed every few days, offering a fresh selection of music clips.
RoyaltyFreeMusic.com owns all copyright interests in the music clips posted on this page.
These music clips may be used in conjunction with educational or personal not-for-profit programs and projects at no cost. RoyaltyFreeMusic.com requires that clients using these free music clips must cite Royalty Free Music.com, as the source of the music and - when possible- provide a link to our site.
All tracks are copyrighted and registered as follows:

JupiterImages 
© 2009

http://www.royaltyfreemusic.com/

Data visualization: A Map of Olympic medals

I found this data visualisation on the delicious site when I was re directed to the New York Times website in the sports section. The actual content to me as I am not a fan of the Olympics is pretty trivial and useless, but I like the fact that the content indirectly references past world events in it’s data such as the American led boycott of the 1980 Moscow Olympics due to the soviet union’s invasion of Afghanistan. This is not mentioned in the data but it is affected by it. Cool.

The design might not be great looking but it does the job when trying to covey its data. Unlike most of these data visualisations I can understand it and it is nice to have the numbers lurking in the background to accurately determine the medal count. The idea that the circles are geographically placed is also really helpful when trying to find your countries medal count.
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2008/08/04/sports/olympics/20080804_MEDALCOUNT_MAP.html

"Data, data Everywere" dah, dah, dah, dum (dramatic music)

Is the idea of the representation of abstract non-physical information.

Large numbers are easy to comprehend for a computer, but hard for humans.

To engage a human audience we need to use tools that spark visual response, and what we can interpret with ease. They include

- Scale
- Colour
- Shape
- Movement
- Change of position.

Also did some work on my project. If I haven’t mentioned this earlier I am doing the YouTube video about YouTube none the less. I have created a storyboard and I am well on my way to finishing it off. I am yet to find some good music that I want to use in the piece. I am going to many, many different sites that have royalty free music to download, but the music is not as comical or cartoonish as I would have hoped. I will have to keep looking I suppose?

Here are some screen shots of the blueprint style I am trying to achieve in this piece.
I think I drew a lot of the inspiration from the title sequences off the television series Mythbusters, but I have put them into a context I believe.

Multiplicity

Multiplicity was well defined with the phrase “combinational explosion” meaning an explosion of possibilities. The digital world is unfathomably infinite, and due to its immensity content does not adhere to physical scale. An application in the digital world can be as big as a hard drive will allow it.

With a multitude of users using one program we gain “wisdom of crowds” this wisdom encourages diversity, independence, decentralisation and aggregation.

Diversity

Of information and opinion.

Independence

Of thought and opinion

Decentralisation

Of knowing local knowledge

Aggregation

Using this information and making something out of it.

Basically the more people that use an application the more intelligent that system will become.

Take Linux for example. It is an operating system that you do not have to pay for and is generated through user contributions and collaboration. If all of the constructive benefactors had not all partaken in their own unique way’s the system might have been a little flat and not as content rich, but due to its diversity the system is a rival to most of the operating systems that are turning a profit.

Web 2.0

The term web 2.0 implies that this is a second edition of a dispersed medium, and in most respects this is true. I know that through personal experience that the web that was introduced to me in 1998 is vastly different to the web of today. Although they are at their core the same technology the new and the old hardly resemble each other any more, and in this way it is like the web has evolved into a completely new version of itself, coining the phrase web 2.0.

Kevin Kelly says that we are the web, so I suppose in this way as we evolve and change so to will the world wide web.

Now with a high degree of usage from right around the world (over 1 billion) the Internet has become on of the worlds most valuable resources. The more people that use a service the better that service ultimately becomes. There is the problem however that if everybody uses one service then it creates a monopoly, but the great thing about the net is that, no one party owns the entire thing.

Production project A

The main reason for choosing the Commonwealth Bank as an assignment piece was based solely on the accessibility of information and the ease at which a transaction could be completed. The immensity of the website was a challenge to explore and document, but due to this immensity the work ultimately benefited. The amount of content, allowed the research to take a direct path through one of the sites particular interactive transaction processes (in this case the transferring of money from one account to another). The transaction process is displayed using screenshots mashed up together in a sequence as a chronological timeline of events and interaction. This directly show’s the viewer exactly what is happening in the process rather than using iconography as in the first page, which is more of a site map which displays possible navigation outside of the content path of the transaction flow.

Colour within the Information flow was based on the colour of the Commonwealth Bank site itself. Although the site had grey within its colour spectrum a decision was made to stick to the main colour of the logo (Black, Yellow and white). Aesthetically and in functionality the site is very boring but extremely slick and streamlined, and on this basis the iconography was created. The icons used are black which is a dominant colour in the logo and would become the dominant colour within the information flow. Upon this choice of colour, a type of glass effect was applied to the iconography to enforce the professional essence of the site. The iconography was then broken up into sections of varying aesthetic quality and functionality. This was achieved using a key at the bottom of the first pages key. All the graphical elements are categorised n this way.

As the transaction process that was chosen was rather brief, the intricate site map/Information flow was created to illustrate the immensity and bombardment of options one faces when opening a site of such complexity. Even with all this information being drilled into you, the site retains its slick and clean approach to its design. On closer inspection of this site it becomes clear how much thought and effort was exerted from the people responsible for the site, and it ultimately produced a wondrous example of information flow and its uses on the web.

As for the functionality a user could not hope for more in a tool to access and directly affect their account information as they wish. So instead of only focussing attention on the bad things that the site does (not anything), what the site does well will have to be discussed. What it does right starts with what was discussed briefly before which is it’ accessibility to information and how it accomplishes this. Clean lines, clear text, high contrast and a visual hierarchy all contribute to a high standard of user interaction and the ability to access important user info. Another factor to the sites success lies within the realm of its content. The site has very brief yet informative articles, which is great when trying to skim through a bunch of information to access one little piece of info.