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.