The Meta Post…

Throughout this unit I have struggled with the concept of posting stuff on the internet. I am required to have a low internet presence for family reasons and so the concept of voluntarily posting things on the internet has been a challenging one. As a result of this, when setting up the blog I made it as hard to find as I could with my limited experiance, for example, it doesn’t show up in search engines. As such the connectivity I have with other blogs and an audience is currently limmited to whoever I give the URL to, which in this case has been the NMP mash-up, friends and family.

 This hasn’t stoped me from looking at other blogs, but it has meant that I have been very reluctant to leave comments or record where I have been. I have also tried to write as little information about me in the various blog entries  as possible with the exception of the brief posts in puppets. Although these posts tell people some of my interests, they don’t say much about anything else.

There is a growing role of social media within our society -just look at Twitter, Myspace and Facebook- but whether it is as wide spread as some claim… for me, the jury is still out. 

In this article , the claim is made that  “10% of Twitter users account  for 90% of all tweets” as opposed to Facebook  “where the top 10 per cent of users account for only 30 per cent of all content”. This would mean that most people join to see what the hype is about, try it for a month or so and then get bored. I guess if you compare the ability to continuously tweet, to the ability to keep a diary, (at least in my experiance) there are few people diciplined enough to keep it up for an extended period of time.

I think this is also reflected in blogs where there are sparodic entries every couple of months where it would appear people have gotten too busy to write one week and then one week becomes 2, 3, 4 etc…  and the blog ends up becoming a series of  sporadic posts.  Although, if it is a series of really GOOD sporadic posts this doesn’t matter as much

This doesn’t mean that there aren’t some people who do have the dicipline to write regularly, but in many cases, it would appear that you can tell to some extent the reason someone joined the bloggosphere by the amount of activity on their site.  

From what I have seen, people who create a blog with a specific purpose and direction, tend to have a greater presence in the bloggosphere then people who have created a blog for the sake of having a one, and fill it with random ranting. This summation doesn’t mean that there aren’t some random blogs that have generated a huge following, but in the majority of cases, this seems to be what happens.

Most successful blogs seem to build their followers by finding a specific niche to talk about, which people specifically search for and then join in on. The other less guarenteed way of creating an audiance is to let people stumble onto your site and create a feed-back loop where the more people look at it, the more popular it becomes to look at.

Therefore the ammount of connectivity a blog has within the blogoshpere depends on several factors:

• the aimand frequecy of the author
• the subject/s covered(if the subject/s  they write on are popular, the chances of the blog also being popular is greater)
• who their friends are (if they have popular friends then people might check out the blogs these friends are following)
• chance (people randomly stumbling onto a blog they like)

My 3 Nominated Posts…

• Whats all the twitter about?
• The power of crowds
• Cyberbullying

Data Visualisation Rationale

I chose to create a Data Visualisation for Project B.

Here is the Data Visualisation.

The data which I visualised is based around the concept of how much information people put on Facebook about themselves and their friends. Before begining the visualisation part of the project, I collected several sets of data from my facebook friends. These sets were:

• Number of “Pictures of”
• Number of Networks they belonged to
• Relationship Status (not listed/ complicated/engaged/married/ in a relationship/ single)
• Birthday (not listed/ day and month only/ day, month and year)
• Religion (listed/not listed)
• Number of Mutual Friends
• Number of Total Friends
• Number of Picture Albums
• Current City (listed/not listed)

Once I had collected this data I divided it again into 2 groups -numerical and categorical. I then sorted the numerical data by the categories (eg the number of…. by relationship status. I found that not all the data I collected was needed to create the visualisation so I discarded 3 of the sets of data as they weren’t very interesting.

For the remaining sets of data I felt that the Relationship Status set had the most potential to be interesting and chose to focus on it as a way to further sort the other sets of data.

In my visualisation, I have defined each relationship category by using the colour wheel- red, orange, yellow, green, blue and purple- and I have defined each numerical category (Number of “Pictures of”, Number of Mutual Friends, Number of Total Friends, Number of Picture Albums) as a percentage of each colour to show that the sets of data still belonged each relationship status. I then created a set of pie graphs for each individual by using Illustrator. This resulted in what looks like a bar graph but was actually just made up of the small pie graphs.

Some of the issues I found whilst using Illustrator included that the graphs started out in gray scale and I had to hand pick each fragment to colour it. It was also quite fiddly to position each pie as I had to select it and move it manually.

I also created some graphs of the averages of each category and then separated and layered the segments belonging to each category together for easy comparison. They also look quite cool

I found some really cool examples of data visualisations on the Internet, but wasn’t able to treat my data in the same way because I don’t have the required programming skills and my data set was small enough to do by hand. Initally when trying to figure out how I was going to display the data, I used Many eyes to get an idea of how my data would behave in different sorts of graph. This was quite interesting but limiting as well because I found that it automated a fair bit of the process (meaning I couldn’t control the displays in the way I wanted) and also didn’t display my categorical data much at all.

I used the design convention of pie graphs and bars of data to communicate most of the information, yet at the same time I broke convention a little when I separated the pies in the 3rd set to illustrate the direct comparison between images.

I guess the main thing that separates my work from other works in the feild is that this data relates directly to me because it belongs to my friends and (as I found out when collecting my original data sets) no one else has the exact same set of friends as I do.

Thoughts on NMP

I have really enjoyed the lectures and tutes of this unit. I have found them well delivered, thought provoking and interesting. I have been doing 2 web based units this semmester, which has been…..interesting, given the noticable absence of useable internet at home. Out of the 2 this one has been much nore enjoyable. I guess this could be for many reasons such as being conducted face to face (the other only has lectures on line which has proved challenging given that I only hav access to the net at uni…) but mainly because it hasn’t just been spoon-feeding me information. The lectures and tutes have been thought provoking on both practical and theoretical levels and in this way I guess I have interacted with this unit more then the other one.

It’s interesting to find out how much I take for granted, when it comes to the net. I have never really cared before about the hows and whys of the net. I have just assumed that when I press the button it will take me where I want to go.

I hadn’t ever really thought about the true impact of the internet on society either. Sure I knew that it had had a “huge impact”-or at least that is what people told me, but I remained sheltered from the understanding of just how big an impact the net could actually have on me or the world.

The sudden development of this knowlege came as a bit of a shock. Well actually a BIG shock. 2 of the most noticable results of this sudden development were demonstrated by the short term side effects of dreaming in blog posts and html. Both of which were…. odd experiences. Really odd.

Having moved on from this experiance (I can confirm that I no longer dream in either blog posts or html..), I am looking forward to continuing to expand my knowledge of the digital world in which I am living.

Now to find the time……

And the internet connection……

What’s all the Twitter about?

Twitter has truly come into the public spotlight in the last 5 months. Until I began one of my uni courses I had never heard of it let alone considered how much a message of 140 characters or less could change the world. Or maybe it hasn’t…
One message hasn’t has changed the world. The millions of individual messages sent by twitter users worldwide, has created a storm of media stories (see these examples of politicians and celebrities). Anyone who is anyone would appear to belong to this social networking site happily tweeting away in response to the question “What are you doing?”

This constant stream of twitter is continuing to grow as people get swept into the torrent of messages flowing from this site, and I can’t help but wonder what the effect tweeting will have in the long run.

What will be the new social rules regarding twitter? What priority should twitter be given within our life? Should we tweet as events unfold- during lectures, meetings, ceremonies, and in one extreme case whilst fleeing the burning wreckage of an airplane- or should we wait until the moment is over and tweet discreetly after the fact?

Twitter allows us to be the source, broadcaster and consumer of any sort of news we choose to create. With this power shouldn’t there also come a sense of responsibility? and if so how much?

Once said, words of any sort are hard to erase and the implications of a single message can be huge. In the busy world of twitter the emphasis is on what is happening in the now.  It is about sharing your thoughts, feelings and activities with the world at any point in time, be it day or night, drunk or sober, when filled with joy or filled with anger.

Surely then, a tool as simple yet powerful as a single tweet, should be handled with care, lest we regret words posted in haste.

Illustration I did for this blog post

The Power Of Crowds

Crowdsourcing is a new concept that is taking the digital world by storm. The baisic concept is getting many people to undertake part of a particular task for very little (eg $0.02) or no money, often in their spare time. It is a user centred inovation which takes the old saying “many hands make light work” as its motto and can achieve many results in a short amount of time.

It is a kind of outsourcing but instead of outsourcing to either a particular person or company, the brief is put up on a place such as Mechanical Turk where many people can access and complete a small task such as verifing dates, providing comments and descriptions of something or anything else that someone wants to find out about.

Another way of using crowdsourcing is shown at the site Swarmsketch where each contributor can add a line of about 100px long and at the end of a particular length of time creates a sketch on a given theme using the combined total of lines.

Crowdsourcing can also be used for photo sites such as flickr where by using a Creative Commons Licence, anyone can upload and use photos posted by others.

One of the issues that I can see arrising out of crowdsourcing specificaly related to art and design, would be that it may create a percived threat to the design industry by taking work away form those qualified to do it, and it may cause conflict when it comes to the sale of an object created through crowdsourcing as to who owns the work and who gets the profit from the sale.

Awsome Photos

These are some of the images created by a Swedish artist by the name of Erik Johansson…. They are totaly surreal and awesome

Tiffany

I am so excited cos now Violet has a friend
dad and I spent our day off making a puppet stage -which is AWESOME- and the whole kit will make its debut at the Family Camp we are helping run this weekend

My new puppet Tiffany

Cyberbullying

On Tuesday night I watched the ABC program, 4corners. It was on the modern epidemic of cyberbullying, and so I have decide to write down some of the stuff it was talking about.

Bullying has been around for baisically as long as there has been people, and there has long been the idea of “all’s fair in love and war”. Most people have been picked on at some point in their life.

In the past if a child got bullied at school, they would have respite from it at home. Now with the advent of mobile phones and internet, we let the bullies follow us home, and we invite them into the places we are supposed to feel safe and secure. This results in bullying becoming something that victims put up with 24/7 rather then just the 6 or so hours they are at school.

One of the problems with cyberbullying is there are very few outward signs of what is going on. There are no bruises, raised voices or any of the other signs we commonly associate with bullying. Often the child will not complain about it for fear that their parents will reduce their internet privileges and cut them off from their friends.

Most parents have very little idea of the life their kids are living on the net, and assume that because the kids are home and in their rooms, they are safe.

1 in 5 kids have reported being bullied, and some of the satistics on cyber bullying are just as scary. In Australia 10% of kids have reported that they are being cyberbullied; in the UK, 20%; and in the USA a massive 50%!!!! and these are just the kids who report it!!!

The effects of any kind of bullying on the development of a child can be huge. They range through depression, post traumatic stress, nightmares, eating disorders and low self esteem through to self harm and suicide, not to forget any injuries suffered through physical abuse!!

One of the things that scared me was the kid in KINDERGARTEN!!!! who told his mum he didn’t want to live any more and that he had thought of jumping off their balcony. If kids are getting suicidal at the age of 5…. its something I just can’t comprehend.

Tom Wood, a 17 yr old computer whiz suggested this:

if you are being cyber bullied:

• don’t respond
• block and delete the bully
• save it for reference (in case you need it for evidence at some point)
• report to the administrator
• tell someone you can trust
• if necessary, take it to the police.

For more information on the 4corners episode click here

An awesome concept…

My friend forwarded me the video bellow, yesterday and I think it is quite clever and very relevant to this course. The form of media we call the internet has revolutionised the way we view our world and the information within it. The internet allows great freedom and is a vehicle  for innovation and creation such as we have never seen before on this scale.

The rise of the internet has been central to the creation of the intenational culture, which we take for granted today.  It has allowed us to not only instant access world news but allows us to be greatly influential in the creation of it. The advent of blogs, twitter, facebook and other similar sites give us the opertunity to share with the world any of the thoughts,  emotions  and events we  experiance each day, whereas in the past the individual was less likely to become known without the assistance of people who were already in the public eye.  This ultimatly leads to a greater awareness of some issuses, and has frequently resulted in a bypass of traditional media to discover what is happening in the world.

I have run out of time for now, but I just thought I’d share some of the information, thoughts and research that has been running arround in my head for the last 2 or 3 days.