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.

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.