Meta post

During this semester this blog has been something that have forced me to go out and really look for things. I have tried to blog before but without any kind of success. The world of blogging is huge. Bigger then that is the amount of information available as material for this blog, especially since we are blogging about media production.

Since Blogspot does not provide the service of keeping statistics over the traffic on my blog I can't tell how many people that actually reads it every day, but I can see in the fact that there is not one single comment on any of the posts and I have two followers, that it's not too much traffic around my blog. I would say that this has got a little bit to do with the fact that I haven't put it out on any public forums like Facebook or Twittr. I think with the competition there is on blogging there is more interest in blog with more images and less text. I also don't think that Blogspot is a very useful blog site since it doesn't interact different users within Blogspot. I thought that the connection with Google definitely would make it more available, but it didn't do much help at all. I'd say that if I would start a new blog now I would probably use Tumblr or Wordpress since they, partly provide a bigger range of widgets and themes, but also has more interaction available for their members. Blogspot, however, do provide a fair few useful widgets and it does help to structure the blog. The fact that we have got a little bit of knowledge in HTML was very helpful as well, since we then could go in and use embedded material as well. I have used an archive, so that people can find my different posts. I've also used the yahoo pipes to get updates about my friends blog as well as RSS feeds from other bogs that I really like. These widgets have given my blog a sense of dept and variety. The HTML widget was something I discovered late through my blogging but that could have been very useful as well and opened up a few more possibilities. Actually now when I think about it I'm there is statistic counters to use as a HTML widget.

With the followers that I have and through the access to my blog via Moodle, I would say that my audience is people that are interested in media, graphic design and networking. I'd also say that the audience would have a age average around 20-25 because of the amount of text that is in there. younger people, including my self, don't read thing unless they really have to och want to. When I look at blogs I want images, links, inspiration and creativity. I want to get a good visual impression when I enter a blog and if I don't I leave. This is the reason to why I have tried to have interesting images for all of my blog entries and I have put down a lot of time searching different sources and used different kinds of search engines. I found that the ones I liked the most were the tagged based ones where you easily can find related images which can take you even further in your search.

Overall I am really happy with the content of my blog. I find it interesting and it has helped me sort out my thoughts and ideas about this unit. This way of presenting our understanding of the lectures works well and it is good to have something that makes it possible for us to plan our work over the whole semester. It's also been really interesting and useful to have access to all the other blogs since it can clear up things or give you inspiration. I'm content and satisfied with the blog and it will be good to go in and read it in a few months and fresh up my memory.


regards.

My 3 best posts

1. The need to express ourselfs
2. I ffffound nothing
3. Home-made categories

Great people around us.

I was looking through the pipes of our blogs today and found Art Fag. I had one unit with her last semester and she is really good at what she's doing. Now, I really don't want this to sound like I am some crazy stalker, but was one of those thing that just make you stop and really look when I had a look at her photo stream for Project B. She has made a story with the help of flickrs photo stream, and her photos are absolutely amazing. I reckon it is very much worth while to go in and have a look.






This image is from her tumblr site

Rational Project B

This project has been very inspiering in order to present data in alternative ways. It has made me realize how word can sometimes be more confusing then helpful. It also have made me think more about what the important thing in my design is. Is it the colours, the text or the shapes?

I chose to visulize my music list on last.fm. The data is containing all the music I have played since the 17th of January 2008, so almost one and a half years. in order to not get to much data I chose to use the artist that had three plays or more.

My fist idea was to make some sort of tag cloud. I needed something that would visualize amount of plays in size and also show the country. After have looked around for a while I realized just how many tag clouds there were out there and also how boring they were to look at. I wanted something that was appealing to the eye and in the same way would represent my data. I also started to understand that maybe the actual words is not the most important for the whole experience. The names of the artists is off course an important part of my project however the more I thought about it the more I wanted the viewer to immediately get an impression of the image. So I dropped bits of the idea of a tag cloud and looked around for alternatives. I then remembered one of the pages we had a look at during one tutorial, the news map. The news map collect information from Google News and puts i together to create a visual map that displays the hidden patterns from the aggregator on Google News. This was more what I was looking for. It shows the heading news in different countries and it allows you to put in certain criteria in order to find specific news. The visual effect of this is that with simply a few key words and different font sizes and colors, you can quickly get an idea of the news world each day.

To apply this on my project I decided to relate the different artists to each other, depending on their play count, with different font sizes. The amount of plays times three gave me different font sizes that immediately gave the viewer an impression on what had been played a lot and what hadn’t been played much at all. I then decided to create a new world map, where the countries with many artists and/or high play counts became bigger and the countries with fewer artists and/or fewrer play counts got smaller. The result is “my world of music”. Looking at this new world it is obvious which countries that is most popular in my last.fm charts. You can either see this because of the size, but also in the amount of black that is covering up the countries. Some of the countries, Scotland for example, does not have that many artists but “Belle&Sebastian” have been played a high amount of times and therefore increases the size of the country.

I feel like my visualization of the music data is satisfying and it was fun to make. The actual design was challenging and took up a lot of my time. I have learnt a great deal of new things and I will definitely take this knowledge with me since it really simplify and lighten up ways of presenting data.

the one and only

It is just like it is, and it is great. can not get enough of it, even if it is one the most plain and well structured font there is. for some it is just invisible, like the way it is used on signs etc. but for some it is bold and outstanding it its squareness. A couple of years ago a saw a documentary on Helvetica, and if anyone has about an hour over, it is definitely worth while.
When searching flickr, we heart it, google and ffffound, this is what i...found (click on the images to find the source):


Want more?
Check this out.

Meaningful multiplicity

I had a thought about the lecture on multiplicity. It is truly amazing how just by repeating something heaps of times we can build new things. We can create a whole new level of art or experience. I went in and had a look at Chris Jordan's work and it really took my breath away. It is so inspiring to see people that would put in that much time and effort in order to put a message through. It was also really interesting how he'd used thousands and thousands of images to create a bigger images or simply just a color. This is how he describes his work on his web site:

This project visually examines these vast and bizarre measures of our society, in large intricately detailed prints assembled from thousands of smaller photographs. Employing themes such as the near versus the far, and the one versus the many, I hope to raise some questions about the roles and responsibilities we each play as individuals in a society that is increasingly enormous, incomprehensible, and overwhelming.

Chris Jordan, Seattle, 2008

I really think that the way he has used multiplicity is so effective and strong and it really gets the message through in a strong and touching way. The actual way that multiplicity works also gives you this feeling of interaction, even if it is still images. it gives the same effect as zooming on a screen, but you're just moving your body closer to the images.

Chris Jordan talked about his work at the TED conference 2008. He there talked about how he has visualized the overwhelming statistics in contemporary issues that we have to deal with soon but we choose to look away. His way of using multiple images to show his point rather then to show numbers makes it far more real, far more intelligent and far more emotionally grabbing.
This is an amazing work of art that I probably wouldn't have come across if it wasn't for this class, and for that I take my hat of.


This video it taken from the TED website.

TED - ideas worth spreading

Visualize this!

For my data visualization I googled the term to find some inspiration. And the stuff I found. There is so many ways of visualize data in so many interesting ways.
These are a few awesome ways of creative solutions:

fidg't
"Fidg’t is a desktop application that aims to let you visualize your network and its predisposition for different types of things like music and photos. Currently, the service has integrated with Flickr and last.fm, so for example, Fidg’t might show you if your network is attracted or repelled by Coldplay, or if it has a predisposition to taking photos of their weekend partying. As the service expands to support other networks (they suggest integrations with Facebook, digg, del.icio.us, and several others are in the works), this one could become very interesting."
(text source)

Digg Stacks
This is a data visualization of diggs on digg.com. It works so that the more people that diggs something on the web, the higher the stacks get. This is a real-time visualization and it is more then easy to spend a few hours here.

TagLines
"Taglines from Yahoo! Research allows you to visualize Flickr tags over time. For each day, dating back to June 4, 2004, the eight most popular tags are shown with a photo selected for each. You can view Taglines in waterfall mode, which displays eight tags and respective photos in eight rows, or in river mode, where tags and their photos “flow” from right to left."
(text source)

These are just a few examples that I found that I really thinks work perfectly. It is such a good idea to visualize something that normally would be really confusing or hard to see or simply just boring. I could really get in to this kind of designing. It is smart and very entertaining.

Make sure to check out:
walk2web
Digg RADAR
Zillow
CrazyEgg
KartOO

Home-made categories

Something that got stuck in my head after the lecture in week 5 was the concept of folksonomy. How we have, in difference to taxonomy, have found a system to this very loose and undefined way of categorising things. I really like the idea of tags and how they are informal and personal. It means that we can take a part in other peoples associations and metaphors which in the end will open us up to new ways of thinking.
So what exactly is folksonomy? Well, it is a social way of giving things a belonging with the help of tags. This is a informal and loose way of putting things in to a category. an example of a folksonomy is how flickr uses tags to structure their collection of photos. The different tags and the combination of tags give the photo a category, although it could be categories like "bullshit" or "crap". This photo from flickr is taged with the words: audio, music, sound, listen, stereo, hifi, mono, speaker, pump, disco, tape, tapeplayer, player, cassette, unraveled, mess, broken, spewing, spitting, pattern, chaos, magnetic, retro, symmetric, mirrored, reflection, tangled, unwound, fastfoward, rewind and eject. Now all of these tags is related to this image, but in all kinds of different ways. they are personal, individual, metaphoric or literal. this means for example if I'm looking for something that will represent mess I can find this photo, and it might represent mess in a different way then I was thinking but it is still a mess.
another example of a good use of tags is tag clouds. This is a collection of tags which have a size factor attached to them as well. For example the tag cloud on We Heart It (click on the image to get a bigger picture).
The encourage everyone to tag their hearted items so that people easily can find what their looking for, or at least a range of suggestions. I think this is a great way of presenting a web site with this kind of information. it is easy, it is inspiring, it is effective and it gives you an idea on what the most popular images have been tagged with.

ffffound nothing

Today I had a look through the photos on We Heart It (yes I am now obsessed with that site) and when I clicked on the source of one of the images it took me to an other similar style of web site. It is called ffffound and has an amazing amount of great images. So I had a look around and it was built on a tag system as well, all up, very similar to We Heart It but a slightly different style. So I thought I'd register. But no. It is built on an invitation only register system. So unless I have some friends that has invitations to give out I can not become a member of this site. This really annoyed me and the fact that not just anyone could become a member, made the whole thing so much more attractive. Then it made me think. In the lecture on Web 2.0 we talked about user based information. How web sites like Amazon.com started a revolutionary concept through their user based rating system, where books that had been forgotten long ago all of a sudden became bestseller again. Now, this way of rating is built on the fact that the more users there is, the more value it gets.
Now, ffffound do not care about that, even though it will be more logically tagged images, and a broader range of tags and images, with a larger members group. They value the mystery around the web site and the human nature to want what we can not have, more then having a large quantity of material.
These are some of the images I've found on ffffound, and if anyone have an invitation to the site, I would love to have one. I'm not desperate or anything. Or. Hm.

I [heart] We Heart It

This is amazing. When studying graphic design it is vital to have a source of good inspiration. And here it is. We Heart It .com is a web site that lets you show other people what you love. this basically means that it is a mega source of inspirational thing that every one is creating and everyone can be a part of. Such an amazing idea. This is how it is explained on the website:

--------------------------------------------------------------

get visual inspiration from what's best in the web

1 bookmark images and videos from any website with one button

2 see what everyone is 'hearting' and heart it too

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It works with the help of bookmarks. You drag this symbol up on your bookmarks bar and then when you find something out on the Internet that you want to heart, you press the symbol and it allows you to heart it.

So for example, if i found this image I simply click on on my bookmarks bar.

And then it finds the object and makes a frame around it which allows you to add it to your heart (click on the images to make them bigger).


Then it opens a new tab with you chosen picture in you We Heart It account.

So simple and so smart!

So join, and heart. Now.

Rationale

I chose to make a online exhibition about Sweden. The choice of topic was partly because it is something that I know by heart, since I am from there, and partly because I don’t there is any good sites about Sweden out there. When you find a website about a country you’ll find that it feeds you with stereotypes. This is somewhat necessary in order to describe traditions, the people and general facts about the country. This is however often not how people really live or how they really behave. My heart especially lies in the page about Stockholm. If you go to Stockholm as a tourist you won’t fond the good places. You just won’t, unless you really make an effort. I felt like this was a great opportunity to make a proper website about Sweden that would show another side of the country and the people.
When I started this project I looked around on different ways of publish this website. I tried to work with Dreamweaver, iWeb and blogspot. None of those ways of producing website suited my purposes so I had a look at Wordpress. This suited my project because of the easy way of creating new pages. On the other hand you have very limited ways of controlling the layout but since this project didn’t involve designing in that sense it didn’t bother me too much. You could however go in and change the html of the pages. Since I have never worked with html before this unit, it was a great challenge to understand and manage a small website and see how it is built up. I started of with building up my different categories. This included a lot of research and required me to narrow down the content on my web page. First I hade eight or nine different categories and then I narrowed it down to five (excluding references), which is much more manageable. I then created some under categories to create a bit more dimension to the page. I then started to create the network of information I needed to make my web page stand out towards other websites about Sweden. This was not only about writing the content on the different pages but also collect links and images that were suitable for the content.
The Different tools I’m using on the website is mostly RSS feeds from different sites. This much due to the porous of my website, which is to show Sweden from a different perspective, and for this flickr worked perfectly. With the help of yahoopipes I created a RSS feed from flickr showing images including the word “Sverige” (Sweden in Swedish). This gave me a perfect variety of images form summer, winter, south and north. Most of them are well-composed images that show a great side of Sweden. I also used the link widget to display other people’s work and show a broader collection of Swedish websites. When I chose these links I made sure that there were both official and unofficial material. One that I am particularly happy with is the “How to learn Swedish in 1000 difficult lessons”. This blog’s compliment my blog in a great way since it is written by a American middle aged man that is living in Sweden and is battling with all these Swedish social rules, where as I know the rules and have an other perspective on my blog. I have over all worked a lot with links since Wordpress is slightly restricted on adding widgets. There is a function where you’re supposed to be able to put in any html code as a text widget but I never got it to work and I suspect that it is not available for the web based blogs.
I have not during these project come a cross a website that is similar to mine, and I believe that is because not a lot of Swedish people decides to do a website about Sweden. I also think that the youthful perspective that I bring in to this website is unique. I think that the layout suits my content. It’s clean and easy, black and white features and a very square design. This match up with the Swedish minimalistic deign culture and also in many ways reflects the Swedish people, who are quite squared and reserved.
Most of the images have a Creative Commons license and there for only need an acknowledgment of the owner. On mu music page I have used images from last.fm, and they are all listed on my reference page.
This project really got me to realize how important these collectors of information’s are. The internet is a unlimited resource of information that is there for everyone to use, but in order to find what we’re looking for we need pages that organizes, collects and structures the material so it is easy to accesses and decrease the amount of time we have to spend to find the information we desire.

The wonder of bloging

Now, I am very aware of the fact that I have done two pathetic posts on this blog so far. Not very impressive at all. But I haven't had anything good to write about, and also other uni assignments has been taking over my time.

But finally I have pulled my self together and here is my third blog post.

I just came to think about the amount of history our generation will be leaving behind. When kids are doing history in 100 years, they will have so much information on our lifestyles and habits that it will be overwhelming. And the beauty of it all is that it will not just be information about famous kings, queens or military people. It will be a unending source of information, written by us, normal people about our normal lives. We can, with our blogs, Facebooks, Flickrs, You tubes, and twitters leave our own history behind. and even if it is not the most revolutionary information or stories about how we conquered our neighbour countries it is still fascinating. I really wonder what this will mean for the future, and how big Internet can become. Is it eternal? Will it never end. How will it be structured, if that is the case? Or will Internet be as out of date as letters is starting to be to us? It is so interesting, I wish I could be there to find out.

(Image designed by Sebastian Prooth)

The top 5 blogs

I really like blogs. It is amazing how people can post things about their lives or collect information and media in such a interesting way. At the moment I have five design blogs that I check regularly. These are great sources for inspiration and the best thing is that they are constantly updated, as blogs are.

The first one is Net Diver. This blog is a collection of design and it is wonderful. It's smart and criticizing. It updates on a regular basis and its contents is very inspiring. These kinds of blogs are so important for me when I lost all my inspiration.

3 reasons to visit:


The second one that gets a daily peek from me is Abduzeedo. It is a pure graphic design blog that simply collects images to inspire others but also provides tutorials. This way of sharing design and teaching others is great. We can't be designers without inspiration and if no one wants to share their work then we have completely lost the reason with design. I really enjoy this blog and I really get inspired by the material that is provided.

3 reasons to visit:


The third blog on this list is Monster-Munch. It is also a design blog but it doesn't necessarily focus on graphic design. It is more like a blog about smart and new design from both known and unknown designers. It also covers all different kinds of disciplines with in design. Definitely worth a daily visit.

3 reasons to visit:


The fourth blog that I recommend is about patterns. I love patterns. There is a unlimited amount of patterns everywhere and on this blog, Print and Pattern, they are collected together. Amazing. This is great inspiration when ideas over-filling your head. Patterns are overwhelming design elements that is an explosion of lines, colors and great design. Have a look and feel good.

3 reasons to visit:


The fifth blog that I constantly look at is fine little day. This blog belongs to a middle aged Swedish woman who simply documents the world around her in a highly aesthetic way. She has thousands of projects that she shares with her readers and is a great little push in your back when you're stuck. I also love that it is such a typically Swedish design and it is great to look at the photos she takes, since they remind me of home. Beautiful blog with a very low key feeling to it.

3 reasons to visit: