My Data

Unfortunately I missed the lecture for this week because I only flew in late from Brisbane the night before and I couldn't see myself getting up to catch the 8 o'clock bus to go to Uni the next morning. So that also means that I missed out on learning about Data Visualization. I really hate missing lectures (that does make me sound kinda like a weirdo) but I seriously feel like I miss out on important information when I do. It then meant that going into the tutorial that afternoon I had no idea what Data Visualisation was. Thankfully it didn't take me long to understand what it was. When I first looked at the assignment options for this production project I saw the first one and pretty much crossed it out because I didn't understand what it was. Now that I have an understand I might even do it for my assignment. I found it really interesting collecting that information. I particularly liked the data collected by the "Feltron" guy. I thought that was really cool and I would love to do something like that but I don't think I have the time to do something like that... :P I also really love Google Trends and I find it really interesting...

My Break

Well... I haven't written a blog post in a couple of weeks because I have been on mid-semester break so I have been busy writing assignments and what have you. So... I really need to write a new post. It is nice to have that last assignment done as well because I am pretty proud of how it turned out. As for the rest of my two weeks off I haven't exactly done a lot. I wrote two essays and that is about it. Now that I am back from my the break though I have been back into the normal routine. Today in Networked Media Production we wrote some basic HTML which I really enjoyed. I have never done anything like it before and thought it was pretty clever. The closest I have got to do with HTML before was back in High School when we had to create our own web pages and we would copy and paste HTML into our own webpages :P So this was a nice new experience... Can I just say that Ice-Cream Sandwiches look pretty gross... I don't know what else to say about it other than I really enjoyed doing it but feel like I am not competent enough to do it on my own for the next major assignment.  

My Rationale

The Olympic Effect is a blog that looks at how the Olympics will effect China now that the Games are over. It took me awhile to decide on a current issue for the assignment. The obvious choice was the Olympics because of the mass media exposure it was getting but I wanted to do something different. After some thinking I decided that I would do the Olympics but because it is such a large topic I could focus on just a certain part of it. The country of China is just such an interesting place and because everyone has learnt so much about it lately I thought that it would be interesting to see how the Games have affected it. The next step was to come up with what I wanted on my blog. I really wanted a site that would have writing, photos and videos plus external links to other sites. Being a reference page I thought that the most important thing was external links. I found a good quote that I put towards the top of the page and then found a YouTube video that is a Chinese advertisement for the Olympics. I found some great photos from Flickr and then wrote a few articles about the information I had gathered. There are quite a few links to out side sites and articles. I added a poll to find out what people who visit the site liked about the Olympics. I also created a Photoshop title which I thought gave the site an interesting and striking title.

There were a few things I had problems with. Firstly I wanted to rearrange the order of the blog posts which I discovered from Nathan could only be done by changing the date that they were posted on. To avoid confusion I then removed the dates from each blog post so that they were not seen as 'daily' posts but they compliment each other by being all together. The other problem was I couldn't link the photos in the posts back to their originally site. I did the right thing by saying who they were by but couldn't manage to have the photos as links themselves. After a lot of experimenting the only thing I could do was to put the captions that are underneath the photos as links back to the Flickr page.

I have actually been quite pleased with how the page has turned out and because this is still a relevant issue I feel that more could be added to it all the time.