Wednesday, April 22, 2009

Media Royals

I Have To Say
I strongly believe that closed source proprietary media is bottle necking the potential for our economy to grow. Proprietary media prevents the collaboration of thought and ideas between composer's of media. In general, media is derived from intellectual work, however proprietary media prevents this knowledge from being distributed. It is quite possible composer's are reinventing the wheel instead of expanding on already established ideas that could potentially revolutionise different areas of discipline.

The Solution
Royals are one of the driving factors for proprietary media. The welfare of society heavily relies on this system. Although this is only a sugared coated excuse that composer's take pride in hiding behind. The majority of composer's disprove this notion of cause and effect, which contradicts the idea of less effort is equivalent to a greater income. My solution would be to look for alternatives where composer's can benefit off others work and also make an honest income. One suggestion, is that all source code should be freely available and royals should only be made through technical support. Like all different types media the context may change but essentially this approach could be easily adopted to different areas of discipline.

Relevent Links...
I invite you to look at a college's blog that covers a personal view on creative common licencing, this is the post where I originally got my idea... perma link
also, feel free to check out ~ covers some interesting material!!!

Reference

Tuesday, April 14, 2009

The Power Of Blogging

Blogging is the only form or media where you can target a global audience from the comfort of your chair. They give power to those who have a voice. On of the reasons why I think blogging is so successful is because it's uniqueness. People are able to express commentary, individual ideas without prejudice. The content is always changing, from an observers point of view the information is always fresh that presents alternative ways of thinking.

Secondly, their is an artistic side to blogging. Bloggers enjoy the challenge of how to present their content in an effective manner. From trail and error, I have learnt that great blog posts make use of white spaces, formatting, graphics, the list is too extensive to cover here. But the basic idea is to get viewers interested in reading your posts, and this is the challenge that the vast majority of bloggers look for. Try it for your self...

References
Lecture Notes

Thursday, April 9, 2009

Critique Rational

The critique can be downloaded by this link

Before choosing a website to critique there were a number of requirements that needed to be evaluated. I wanted to choose a growing medium with an obvious user base. One of the major specifications was to critique the websites internal information flow with particular attention given to user management. A website with a large user base would need to facilitate its members and by extension how they interact with the website. Amongst the spectrum of popular websites MySpace nicely fits this scaffold. Being already familiar with MySpace, the critique didn't require me to learn how MySpace functioned from ground up and also allowed me to write a more in depth critique within the given time frame.

Prior to writing the critique a little bit of preparation needed to be done. I had to familiarize myself with the art of analyzing content. The challenge here, is MySpace offers such a wide selection of content it would be impractical to cover all of it. I initially devised a diagram to assist with the main points I would cover. This helped throughout the writing cycle as I had a visual to refer to. Originally the critique focused on specialized areas of MySpace; however this approach didn't allow me to compare MySpace with other similar social networking websites. Another change I needed to perform, where my targeted audience. I didn't take into account the general reader, and having a strong software development background it was easy to diverge to information that wasn't relevant. As a consequence my initial draft was scraped and only the essential points were expended.

When writing the critique, I initially developed a blue print of how it would be structured. The blue print had set the basis for expending on the key points; ultimately it ensured I didn’t miss out on any relevant information and kept the information integral. With each main point in mind, I devised a set of manageable sub points. This helped with time management and allowed me to systematically expend on each point with in a set time frame. One pitfall I ran into is that I needed compare MySpace with another social networking website. Having only ever used MySpac the learning curve was steep. The process involved me setting up an account with another social networking website called Tagged. Originally I was going to choose FaceBook as the comparison website. However, with the reader in mind I thought it would be more interesting to expend on an on line social community that is less mainstream.

The cultural context of this critique was unique in the sense that MySpace didn't have a distinct start and finish such as a book or a featured film. Unlike other forms of sequential media that doesn't require user interaction, MySpace proposed interesting implications. The ability to manipulate and govern information flow dramatically changes the context of how a user interacts with a medium. Furthermore it was difficult to find concrete material that offered opinions on these of mediums of this status. With limited resources to work with, a different means of gathering information was needed. As a result, the critique was entirely based on my knowledge of networked media. My work he differed to others in the field, in the sense that there is no sequential structure in which content comprising of MySpace could be ordered as depicted in the diagram.

Wednesday, April 1, 2009

PRESENTATION

It's interesting how idea's can be expressed in one or more forms. It's a well noted fact that different people may have different interpretation of a given concept. That is, it could have a different message to that person. In the world of presentation, both in the software and web design realm, there are precautions that are taken in respect to different cultural implications. This could vary to content that resemble a religious form to information that wrongly accuses one's welfare. Although, strictly saying every person interprets a given content
different is not entirely true according. Psychologist strongly believe that there are
some color effects that have universal meaning “... ·
  • Red was used to stimulate the body and mind and to increase circulation.
  • Yellow was thought to stimulate the nerves and purify the body.
  • Orange was used to heal the lungs and to increase energy levels.
  • Blue was believed to soothe illnesses and treat pain.
  • Indigo shades were thought to alleviate skin problems.
reading this kind of poked a hole in my logic, however the site goes onto to describe this idea is not necessarily true either. if you also find this interesting, I encourage you to look into it... until next time :-)

References

Wednesday, March 25, 2009

Redundant Media?

Ok, I'm going to divert a little bit from the content I have previously peen posting :-(.... After reading the criteria for this blog for a unit called “Networked Media Production”, I've come to the understanding I've been going around this the wrong way. In light of recent events, these posts will be more related to different branches of networked media such as html, css, content, presentation, layout etc....

I would like to
talk about my understanding of media.... here's a pictorial view of my logic I draw up in paint..... So here we have tool little chumps communicating and expressing ideas to each other. But what's interesting in this diagram is the poorly drawn line referred to as the medium... The line is symbolic to how mediums can take different forms. Audio, text, and visuals are all forms of media (media, plural for medium)... in fact, I'm expressing my ideas through this post. I think the advancement of IT has had a dramatic effect on how media is interpreted. No point in history has information become so freely available. I strongly believe media challenges the mind to think and act in a certain way according to the producer's intent. However society is growing resistant to this manner of interpretation. Namely, being constantly bombarded with advertisement every day, from your online social networking profile to a massive drive by billboard, it starts to get obvious that people will grow bored of this and eventually take no notice of media. This raises to important question:

To what lengths must a producer go to, to keep their work fresh and persuasive?

References
Picture produced in MS-Paint

Wednesday, March 18, 2009

Logic

It’s about 10:33 pm, I’m sitting in a comfortable computer chair thinking to myself, “oh god, do I really wan to write this entry”… but being the genuine guy I am, I felt implied to do so.
This week I’ve been thinking about life, and what it is composed of. As a software developer, I like to try and relate reality in terms of a computer. At times this can be difficult, but one concept that fits well is logic. Logic can be defined in two ways:
* formal
* informal
Formal is the definition mathematicians tend to use. They enjoy systematically proving propositions by examining if the concluding directly draws from their hypothesis, although there are many methods for proving propositions, my favorite in particular
proof by contradiction

Informally, logic could be described as an intellective process that involves solving a particular problem intuitively. As humans grow, so do their understanding of the world. i.e. logic would tell a person if something is hot then don’t touch it or you will be burnt. Ironically enough this statement could be expressed in symbols using discrete mathematics. Note that in the real world, quantities are generally expressed in a continuous manner. Although in the digital world this is quite the inverse. With that said I invite you to check out this YouTube video I found of a guy replicating logic using dominoes, enjoy…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SudixyugiX4

Tuesday, March 10, 2009

HTML & CSS

Maintainability
The aim of web development is to separate content and presentation. This extends the life of
the code, allowing it to be reused, ported and easily maintained. Using this method processing
becomes centralized and modifications can be made from a single reference point. When coding in a programming language I try to keep to this
convention. After looking at HTML, I wondered how this same convention could be used, then i discovered CSS.

My Approach
HTML differs from many other languages is the sense it's a markup language that describes what is being presented rather then computing an algorithm. I learnt in class that HTML was never designed for formatting text, although it is included anyway. Saying this it is often misused... CSS on the other hand allow web developers to design templates to control the formatting aspects of the information being presented. Using CSS in conjunction with HTML it is possible to adopt the conventions described previously. To further your knowledge take a look at....
http://www.w3schools.com/htmL/, extensive tutorials for beginners
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML, little bit of back ground knowledge

references