Vixien's trouble...

So this will be my final post on this blog for Networked Media Production class.

It’s been interesting blogging about a subject on a weekly basis, I can talk about academic topics in a casual tone and not have to write like a tool (like in most essays), I can be direct with my points, I don’t have to go around in circles, I can just say it as it is, I like that. We should have more assignments like this, I reckon this would be great for people who are too shy to speak up in class and allow them to slowly overcome their shyness; simply by posting just whatever they want to talk about and kind of make up for what they didn’t get the chance to say in class. I mean I have plenty of communcation and international studies classes where some people hardly say anything but when they do (in presentations, debate or when they must), their opinions are gold!!! So I do believe that there are many advantages in blogging.

As I have mentioned in my first blog that tumblr.com was not my first choice, xanga.com was my first choice but since I semi-destroyed that site with HTML code and really could not be f#$ked fixing it, I decided to pick another web site for me to destroy. I have to say though tumblr.com is probably very easy for a blogging beginnger to use, it is very frustrating for blogging regulars or experts to get used to. Simply because of the layout of their options, for example, while posting a text blog, you can’t randomly add in HTML code; and there isn’t a rich-text/plain-text/HTML button in which you can just press or click (like xanga.com), and then insert HTML code (for videos or url of images). To do so, you have to actually go into the account settings and turn the rich-text option off and then proceed to edit or write your blog in rich-text, which is a massive inconvenience. What I also found frustrating was the help options and frequently asked questions pages, they don’t really help much as most explaination is very vague and doesn’t seem to actually answer the question.

Tumblr.com is not that big on traffic tracking, there is the option of doing it via google analytics and get your web traffic stats from google, I found that very strange that tumblr needs google to handle their own stats. Also one of the reason why I choice to use xanga.com first, mainly because they have this footprint option, all you have to do is click on it then you will be able to see how many visits you have recieved (up to 7 days data), and which other users have visited your page and which page and very specifically stating the previous page they visited before going to your page (someone might have googled a keyword to get to my page or saw my username on another user’s page, very exciting stuff). And the interesting thing is that if the people who visited my site are not xanga user, xanga.com will then provide to me which country that viewer is from and funny enough which browser he or she was using. Funny enough, most of the German viewers who visited my xanga page use Firefox, and so far 90% of the Australian viewers use IE. I think it’s little fun facts like that which kept me blogging with Xanga.com but I like trying new things, I supposed by using tumblr, it makes me appreciate xanga even more. Haha… sounds like a terrible to say, considering I’m blogging about this on tumblr.

So I have to nominate 3 blogs… let’s see…
1. Internet censorship and creativity
2. Q&A
3. He did the mash, he did the monster mash

Project 2 - Geo-narrative - note that there are two pages of geo-tag, and tags from second page for some reason will not show on first page, so please make sure to view second page for the full assignment, thank you very much.

When I first decided to do this project, I had a feeling I might have bite off more than I can chew, but I had so much fun completing this assignment, mainly because it is something that I’ve been meaning to do but had not gotten the change to.

So I decided to use the pictures that I’ve taken during July 2009 holiday and put it in google map and creating a geo-narrative. I am positive that there might be more than 30 pictures used in this assignment, aside from the locations listed below, all the photos belong to both my stepdad’s and my facebook pages (with his permission of course).

Jolimont centre - http://photos-c.ak.fbcdn.net/hphotos-ak-snc1/hs171.snc1/6416_139983181904_533761904_2930546_53303_n.jpg

Sydney airport - http://www.ratewall.com/cpics/70518d56-c10e-44a5-ae0c-86993ad386f2_Sydney_Airport.jpg

Pudong airport - http://images.beijing2008.cn/20080309/Img214264295.jpg

Xintiandi - http://www-scf.usc.edu/~haojunwa/images/1073294107_3894239.jpg

Marco Polo hotel - http://www.stayhongkong.com/img/Prince_Hotel-Facade.jpg

Ocean park - http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/4a/Ocean_Park_2,_Hong_Kong,_Mar_06.JPG

Hana Kai Maui - http://www.hanakaimaui.com/images/HanaKaiBeach.jpg

I was lucky enough to have all the photos that I wanted to use already uploaded on facebook, so it saved me the trouble of uploading all the photos on website like flickr.com. I, of course, had to alter some of the routes and cut out some locations that we actually visited but could not included into the map, simply because it would become far more complicated and I probably would not finish this on time. I did find it funny though because it looks like I had many one day trips in 4 different countries, while as in real life, I spent more than 2 weeks being away. If only google map has the option to include time, but that would again make my work far more complicated.

Before beginning this assignment, I did not even know that I could create a geo-narrative on google map, it is like an awesome version of travelling photo album. You can get a sense of the location and how far apart or close one location to another is, google map even tells you the distance and travelling time (although not always accurate considering google map cannot calculate the crazy traffic in China and H.K.); and most importantly, both my stepdad and I found it so interesting that we could simply click on “search nearby” to look up on locations that we went to or look up names of location that we have forgotten about. So this is extremely handy and I do believe that I will expend (and correct) my geo-narrative once I received a mark for this assignment and share this with my family, or perhaps create another geo-narrative map for my next trip.

Though one of the main problem I had with google map is that it lags quite often especially when I am looking at areas outside of Australia, there was no problems with my internet, I am pretty sure it was a google map problem. Also it tends to like to off itself and does things on its own or refuse to let me create a path from time to time; and the only way to resolve this problem is to save, and refresh the page. But problems aside, for a first time user, I was surprised at how easy it can be done, especially when the final result looks so complicated. I also found it very user friendly that they provided a youtube video teaching first time users how to create a geo-narrative map.

I have decided to work on geo-narrative instead of datavisualisation, I thought I probably won’t be able to do all the materials justice (as I have mentioned in my last blog) by creating a datavisualisation. So I have decided to pick geo-narrative but dropping the Napoleon idea, just because it’s proved to be too difficult and too expensive to get the appropriate clothings and find the location to take photos of the reenactment. Instead I will be using google map to create a wonderful travelling album, I went travelling last June to Hong Kong, Shanghai, a few hours in Japan, Maui and Honolulu and have taken heaps of pictures, and many of the locations were just absolutely gorgeous and wonderful, what better ways to share my experiences?? And maybe it will give people ideas about what to do or see before going to that country. My geo-narrative is no going to be so great that it could serve as a travelling guide, but it does give me lots of great ideas of creating different maps and perhaps tracing back to many trips that I’ve taken in my life; making geo-maps and sharing it with my family and my friends.

I am in the stage of still considering whether to do datavisualisation or geo-narrative.

My initial idea was to do the datavisualisation either based on the books that I have read or the movies that I have seen. But then I wasn’t sure how to do all these material justice, thus why I’m still thinking about it.

Secondly, I was thinking of doing a biographic style geo-narrative, possibly on Napoloen Bonaparte and on his invasion to the neighbouring countries. The only problem is I will have to get a few friends and make them reenact some of the scenes. This will be problematic, considering I will have to look for the appropriate location, not to mention getting the right period costume. Maybe I’m getting way ahead of myself.

I will definitely have to do some thinking this week, and squeeze more hours out of a day to finish all my assignments… sigh… such is life.

So I didn’t go to the class this week because I was sick. But looking at the tutor exercise, I then went to google.com and wikipedia the wikipedia, just because I think when talking about collective intelligence, wikipedia is like the bee’s knees; as everyone can contribute their knowledge (sometimes opinions rather than knowledge) on different topics, and some people really put in the effort of quoting and referencing from academic sources and giving credit where credit is due.

I didn’t realise that “wiki” is Hawaiian for “quick”, ah, I learn something new everyday. I think that Wikipedia has such a huge cultural signifance, I know plenty of people including myself that I need to know something, let it be definition of specific terms (jargans) or historical events, many of us will go to google.com and type in the keyword with wiki right behind it. It is so widely used that comedian Stephen Colbert often referenced from Wikipedia and even corned the term “wikiality”, how did I know that?? Well good old trusty Wikipedia!!

Well it really isn’t a holiday now, is it?? I have done nothing but assignments and studying… sigh… I miss having 2 weeks of semester break, I like not having a social life for a week and destroy all the assignments and then party straight for a week… having only a week of semester break is very very very VERY cruel. Damn it, UC!!

Project 2

I eventually decided on doing project B - current affairs, I believe that it is a chance for me to express myself and my opinion about violence in school. It is something that worries me and something that I care very much about. I have two younger brothers, 15 and 12 who live in a different country, making it very hard for me to keep up to date with how they are doing, whether they’re happy in school or not. Sometimes, I have thoughts about my brother being bullied, and it usually makes me very anxious. So I decided to write about how there should be actions to help stop violence in school, especially here in Australia, we keep hearing about different bullies at school and how it has escalated in the last decade or so.

The challanges of this project was to look for enough sources to support that violence can be put to a stop, and I have to admit that I was able to find more useful sources from the USA than sources from Australia, which is very disappointing. I have also decided to hypertext link examples or theories that I refered to in the article instead of doing a bibliography, mainly because from experience, I find it easier if I can just click and open a link mid-way of an online article instead of scrolling all the way down to reach for the source.

I was lucky to know about the current affair videos from youtube.com, or else it would have been a struggle to try to find relevant videos. The problem with using youtube is that there are so many bad quailty and irrelevant videos, a phone video of a 6 seconds fight simply does not help conveying that message that I was trying to express. The second problem of using youtube is that many youtube users do not actually have copyrights to the videos that they upload, I was wishing to download the videos that I wished to use and upload them onto my blog, however, my youtube download websites seemed to have failed on me, so I had to take a risk and hope that the videos would still be available come marking time. Although it is practically the same risk as to hyperlinking any other websites to my blog, because I simply cannot predict whether the websites would work in a week or month or a year time. 

Just a thought about my project, I was thinking project A would be interesting to do because it will be a nice way to showcase my photos and paintings and so on, I was thinking that flickr.com might be a good choice, but it’s still too early for me to be 100%, considering I know for sure that I wouldn’t be able to really start thinking about the assignment until this weekend and at least until I am done with my 3000 words essay.

We learnt about ontology, taxonomy and folksonomy this week. It’s surprising how everyone do probably both taxonomy or folksonomy everyday and not realising it. Taxonomy is when everything is categoried and when information are sorted based on criterias, everything needs to fit in its specific class. It makes me think about ranking, like military taxonomy, everyone has their own labels or rank and they only fit into a certain group. Whereas, folksonomy is more liberated, people can label things however they see fit, for example tagging a blog or website and so on.

What is semantic markup?

It is when information and request on the web is defined, when content can be accurately describe and can be understood by the web. Much like HTML, it is a practice of markup following intentiom, and leaving specific layout details to CSS. For example, the denotation of ‘emphasis’ is <em> rather than <i> which stands for ‘italics’.

What might non-semantic markup be?

Non-semantic markup are tags like the following HTML tags which describe the styling directly like <strong> for making fonds bold.

<p><strong>What might non-semantic markup be?</strong></p>

What does the first C in CSS - “cascading” - mean?

It mean you can reformat or arrange things to a specific style.

Censorship. Do people understand the Grovernment’s plan for the mandatory clean-feed? Are there any convincing argments for or against it? Does anyone have a contrary position? Does the Government have a responsibility to protect us from things we shouldn’t see? Who decides?

I think in many ways, people think they understand it but really most of the time it turns into an argument about “oh no, everything will be banned, like China.” Yes Australia might or might not turn into China where wikipedia, youtube and facebook etc are banned, for really blurry reasons. I do believe that it is very hard for the government to regulate the content of the internet considering there are just so many new web sites created everyday. Perhaps Australia can learn from China and enforce “internet police” where most popular blogs, threads and web sites are under serious surveillance, however, mush like what I have already mentioned, millions of new sources or information pop up on the net everyday, the government will only suffer and have a hard time keeping up and I do believe that it can be a major annoyance when popular web sites are shut down or banned for blurry reasons.
I think that there are convincing arguments for and against mandate, one might argue how the content of a web site is discriminating or isolating a ethnic or group or people, but on the other hand, it is also up to those people to either take actions to educate the public about their opinion or simply choose to ignore those content.
I do believe that the government are responsible to protect us from things we shouldn’t see, but only to a certain extend. If they found racist or sex offenders(child-pornography) via internet regulation, then it is of course good news for the public. However, we must not forget that it is our freedom to be able to research or view any content on the internet, the government does not have the right to take your liberty (and perhaps democracy) away. While as who should decide what should be banned and regulated, I believe that is up for the people to decide what content they want to or want their children to view.

Privacy. Does the concept still have meaning?

I believe that privacy has different meaning to people, it’s very much like an empty signifier, you attach as much meaning to it as you wish. If you feel comfortable being open and want to share their information, they can put their information on facebook or myspace public, telling whoever that wishs to listen about where they are going, how they are feeling. But for those, like myself, who prefers to only be open to a closed group of friends or family, I prefer to turn the “private” options on for anything that revolve my name or intimate details. However, I believe this does not just apply to internet usage, with the improvement of technology, people become too relaxed and forget about what their boundaries are.

I remember learning HTML in secondary school, we used to have this IT teacher who everyone hated. So on top of that, he was trying to teach HTML in a very boring way, so even though it was pretty cool to be able to create my own web site by using HTML, I also semi-hated HTML because of the teacher. When it comes to writing a blog or customising a blog, it becomes fairly handy knowing some commonly used HTML codes. My all time favourite code when I was younger is probably ”marquee”, just so I can make blog headings or other things fly around the page in all random directions.

I know very little about CSS but I do believe it does a better at managing a web site, considering how one can manage or change the format of multiple HTML pages instead of having to go into and alter every single HTML page. Major pain in the arse.

I didn’t have time to look more into CSS this week, I have so many assignments that I need to start working :( I supposed it’s not exactly a great idea doing 5 units, but well… I think it’s about time I start to really think about my ProjectA, I have a few ideas but I think I shall expend those ideas in the rationale.

I know the following sounds very formal, I was writing up something for my other class and I just wanted to share my thought about internet censorship and possible contrain on creativity.

It can be seen that copyright laws both promote and constrain creativity. Copyrights and intellectual property laws protect the individual’s right to make profit from their original works. Without this protection, there would be no economic incentive for any individual to be creative, as others could easily copy the original work and extract profits. However, copyright laws constrain creativity by securing important information that others are not able to utilise without special agreement or permission. This information may be crucial to extending a certain product into their markets or developing an idea to create something completely new. This constrain becomes particularly apparent in the digital realm where programs may require other applications to run which are protected under copyrights.
Internet has changed copyright in so many ways, first of all, documents, programs, music and other materially may be easily transferred between users without the authors consent; in the meantime, information laws vary between countries and this can be problematic for local enforcement. Very often, internet data is encrypted and there isn’t a way to recognised what is actually being transferred and whether a copyright violation has taken place; so the greater sharing of information via the internet provides a means to circumvent built-in copyright protection. Projects such as the Creative Commons project, open source software (Linux, Open Office) and Software Developers Kits (SDK) have used the internet to share data, ideas and generally promote creativity.

I have been blogging for as long as I could remember, actually I can remember when I created a blog when I was 14 (1999), it was a website called blurty.com which was very teen very cute-like from what I can recall. Then I moved on to using a couple of other different blogging sites, following the trends way back then (oh god I’m old!). Then I really settled into using xanga.com, my first account was very ‘high-school-popularity-contest-must-add-more-friend’ style. Once I got old enough to start disliking being a teenager, being at high school, the people and the popularity thing, I moved on to creating another blog on xanga; I have been member of that blog since 2/10/2004 and I have been using this blog for six years thus far. Now at the age of 24(almost 25), I still post at least once or twice a week, I don’t always have something to say but it feels like sanctuary, I can type and say almost whatever and no one really cares.

My original blog for this unit was actually a xanga blog but when I started putting more HTML in for blogroll and other links and so on, it crashed on me, luckily I saved my work so all I had to do is fish around for another blog site, copy and paste everything. I came across several blogging sites, wordpress.com, livejournal and so on, but I settled on tumblr. because I like the simple layout and it is extremely user friendly. Although you can’t really customise the page all that much, I do believe that the themes provided by the tumblr. are fairly good, and I was able to find a theme that suits me. However, it does not have blogrolling option, so I did what most people would do, google “blogroll” and ta da!!! I found blogrolling.com, ah… where would I be without google?? So quite simple, all I had to do was sign up and submitting my blog url and then it’s pretty much all done!! So all that was left for me to do is blog.

On this week’s reading, it is an incredible essay, considering it was written in 1945, I was amazed at how much Bush’s theories relate to the technology at present . It’s almost as if he could see into the future, predicting technology inventions like personal computers, the internet and even an online information sharing encyclopedia like Wikipedia. Maybe he might have invented a time travelling machine as well, who knows. From Bush’s words, one can tell that nothing is impossible with the help of technology, as long as one is willing to push the boundaries. it is an very inspirational essay, it made me realised that what I can achieve anything as long as I dare to think or believe that I can.