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I walked into Networked Media Production not exactly knowing what it would be about. Some of assumptions was learning how to use photo shop, blogs and YouTube, However, what it turned out to be was much more. I not only learned about blogs but, other forms of media on the Internet and how these sites have effected the development of human society one example is Twitter, where people note down their daily life and thoughts so that the rest of the world can see what they think and do. I not only learnt about these various devices on the net, I likewise learnt how to use them as an advantage and integrate them into my life so that I can keep up to date on the world around me.

During the first few weeks I learnt about the basics of what we would be going into. One of the staples of the course that I learnt about was the blog. Short for web log, the blog was one of the most helpful pieces of information in the course, this was because simply knowing some starter information about blogs allowed me to go out and read a few, steadily building up my knowledge about various topics that ranged from games to art to movies and various theories about how the world functions.

My Blog:

At first i thought the blog would be a simple task, however, finding something to discuss each week became difficult, as I would usually only have something to say every few weeks. Eventually I became dependant on the Networked media delicious links which provided me with various information to blog about. My further turned into little more than an Internet diary of the previous week. The content of most of my blogs were of little use untill I got to the last three where I began to focus on issues that were put up on the delicious site. I began getting quotes, pictures and links that brought other material together into my blog where they were analysed and reflected upon. On a side note, while I was exploring the many features of Tumblr I somehow linked my flickr account to the blog so that all the pictures Ive uploaded get posted in my blog, while these had no value for the assessment they did add something to look at in a blog of text.

After we learnt about blogs we started to investigate how the countless site on the web were made and what was behind the scenes. This started with a basic introduction to the language behind the web pages, HTML or Hyper text markup language, HTML as i found out is the programing language that tells each web page how to look and function. Writing a document with HTML was at first difficult, even though I had learnt about HTML in high school, however, once the tags became for familiar writing in the language was not as daunting.

As I delved deeper into how the Internet functions I learnt about APIs, Application programming interface, how they work and what they do. APIs were one of the more interesting topics as they involved the different content of the Internet getting mixed together and changed to be similar, yet different, new content. To further explain this I was shown many of the different APIs that are floating around, once again twitter was used, which showed how the many ‘tweets’ could be organised and visualized.

After being shown how the information on the Internet is produced and the tools with which it is manipulated, I learnt about how the information is sorted. I was shown how sorting information on the Internet differed from the real world mainly due to not being physical item and instead being digital items that could be copied and placed into multiple categories. I was later shown that categories were not limiting the information to a single category and that ‘Tags’ allowed information to have greater meaning, something I found to be extremely useful, an example includes trying to find something on YouTube and instead of wading through hordes of random videos and can type in some tags that I believe the video has and then in a few short seconds the video is on my screen. Another example of multiple pieces of information being sorted into the same yet different pile was seen on Wikipedia, where every piece of information is somehow linked to everything else.

As soon as I had become familiar with how information was categorised on the Internet another term was thrown at me, Web 2.0. This topic was my favorite because it involved an idea becoming extremely big. Web 2.0 was explained to be the Internet after a certain point in time, my educated guess is in 2003, and how very rapidly and drastically it changed along with the social customs of the world, in which it influenced. I read that in 1996 the Internet was a simple military based network, which only a few select user could be apart of, however, this soon changed as more and more people became involved causing the Internet to become a huge database of information, shops, social network and countless other devices. I then went on to read about how various theories began to appear about the many phenomenons that occurred on the net. Some of these included; The long tail effect, which was only possible on online shopping sites like amazon, where the sheer amount of niche products generated equal or greater profit than the mainstream products. Along with that I read an article that argued how the Internet had become a living being though all the ideas and content that was constantly changing and being added, a sort of hive mind for the human race.

Following this topic the assignment was due. The assignment was aimed at utilizing the information I had learned into a practical use. I chose to write about one of my favorite directors, Stanley Kubrick, while I found this to be interesting I seemed to have drifted off the task of creating a reference site and instead made a fan-site-esque blog.

On the return from the holidays I jumped straight back into learning about the mysterious wonder of the great Internet. The topic of Multiplicity was a very interesting one, although I missed the lecture, some of the examples were very bedazzling and varied from art to animals of nature.

In the final lecture I learnt about Data Visualisation, which involved, as the title says, visualizing data. I learnt how data which usually starts as numbers in an excel spreadsheet can be turned into some of the most amazing graphs and time lines. along with that, the data can be put up against any other data of that timeline to get some spectacular result, one example in particular was one the TED website where one of the speakers explored the various statistics concerning health, wealth and family size in many different country, what resulted was an entertaining display of colour and movement that showed how life has changed over the past few decades. A different sort of  data visualization and possibly a more spectacular one was seen when I saw several photographs where the photographer had taken pictures all day and then blended together the similarities of each producing pictures from a busy street where everyone is dressed in white to one where everyone is smoking to even everyone wearing sunglasses. These photographs were truly awe inspiring.

For the final project I chose to do a geo-narrative of ned Kelly. By using some of the vast ordinance of skills I had learnt I was able to produce an interesting account of the travels of Australia most infamous bush ranger.

This course has taught me a great deal about the Internet and how it work with relation to media, I have started a few blogs and joined many different communities, namely digg.com and Bloglines, which are now a regular part of my daily routine and are becoming a necessity for me to look at.

Week 15 blog.

This week was the most stressful week of the entire term, disregarding the stress from exams, of which I am quite confident I will do well on the NMP exam. Three assignments were due within a period of 3 days. these included; a japanese assingment, a Intro to Media presentation and a geo narrative for Networked Media Production.

The first one was considerably easy to do as I had the help of a few Japanese exchange students who assited me in writing in japanese and pointing out the many errors I made.

The second assignment was significantly harder than the first as it involved linking several Pictures together and thus creating a slideshow about the various tasks that we had to do. These mainly involved taking pictures, which can be seen on the blog.

The third task of the week was arguably the hardest to do, mainly because I had issues finding photos and doing getting together the actual willpower to make somthing. In the end, however, I was happy with what I made and thought it was a nice little map for any tourists who wanted to explore the area that the infamous Ned Kelly roamed about. In the end I stumbled upon my father’s album of photos taken while we were doing some four wheel driving around the area, which was of great help as they came under the “my photo requirement.

On delicous this week, there was a blog that talked about the many sites that have vaious educational values and listed them in order of how well they each conveyed thier various material. A few of interest included

“ABC Documentaries: This site pulls together some of the best documentaries aired on ABC television in Australia.”

Australian Screen Archive: The Australian National Film and Sound Archive provides free and worldwide access to over 1,000 film and television titles – a treasury of down-under video 100 years in the making.

Internet Archive - Feature Films: This archive of feature films contains some important classics from the 1920s, 30s, 40s and 50s.

In regards to the latter site, it is comforting to know that all that film history has been properly digitally archieved so that it can never physically degrade the way that film reels do. Therefore allowing distant future generations to experience the 20th century of film.

On a more funny note, another delicious link led me to the hitler parody video, which changed the sub titles of the movie downfall. In this parody Hitler is angry about people making parodies of the movie and how it does not infringe on copyright. This is just one of countless parodies circulating the web, some being side splittingly funny while others are plain and boring, some go so far to be quite sick, as they make fun of various phenomenons that are about sick topics, which I won’t go into.

Rationale 2

Why I chose this

Out of the three choices we were given I chose the Geo Narrative. The other options were interesting aswell, particulary the data visualisation, which i attempted to do but, eventually stopped because the constant recording of my various actions became too difficult. However, some of the various data visualisations from delicious were very inspiring particualary the Peter Funch pictures. The Video option was also interesting, however, i did not feel as strongly about it as i did with the other two. I eventually chose the geo-narrative, because of its flexibility and creative sided requirement. After viewing Charles Cummings, 21 steps, I decided to do the Geo-Narrative as my project. While I found the story of Charles Cumming to be of poor quality, I enjoyed the sence of direction and distance that was visualised through his story. This I found would be quite usefull in visualising various event throughout history, giving me the inspiration to go for a historical approach rather than a fictional story. At first I wanted to follow Hannibals legendary march towards Rome, however, I soon found out that EVERY city had its name changed in the 2000 years since. The large distance traveled was another put off for this path, as he traveled through several countries where countless incidents occured. Eventually I though I would follow a closer to home character, Ned Kelly, who had traveled a great distance in his lifetime and had achieved some great feats. As I looked more and more into Ned’s travels I was increasingly impressed at how well he did, as I have gone four wheel driving with my father and seen how trecherous the terrain can be in bushland Australia. Furthermore Ned’s story was a rather short one making it easier to do for this project given the time I had left.

How i went about it

I first researched Ned on various sites and then wrote all of this information down into a google word document. I then divided that document into several sections which i would later use to fill the text requirement in each chapter. I then set up the story, found each of the area where ned traveled and tried to fit them up as best I could. This part took the most time as several locations were vagely described, however, I was awed at the large amount of land that this Australian bushranger had traveled. I then found the required pictures off Flickr, under the creative commons liscene and added them to each of the chapter. Fortunantly for me, my family had done a four wheel driving trip into that exact area allowing me to get accurate pictures of the countryside, without having to go through the hundreds of snapshots found on flickr. these pictures, along with being accurate, filled the 6 pictures of mine which was required by the project.

Problems

The problems I encountered with this project were many. First was the choice, too much of it. I was significantly split between following the many ideas I had and changed quite a few times. Another problem involved flickr, as many users either didn’t want or didn’t care about having a CC liscence, this made it harder for me to find the required amount of pictures. Yet another problem was finding the right information about Ned Kelly, many searches returned with information that was so extreme that it could not possibly be true, for example finding Stringy Bark creek, the search for that ended with me being hundreds of kilometres away from the events that occured during Ned’s lifetime. However, these were countered by various tourist sites that gave vague directions to the famous landmarks and mentioned the town that they were near allowing me to make an educated guess.

Overall this project was interesting to do. I learned a significant amount about Ned Kelly and the vast distance he traveled while causing distress the the government at the time, all while using 19th century technology. I Also learnt a significant amount about the different tools on the internet which can be used to do almost anything.