Lord of The Rings Geonarrative

As of today, uni until the end of the term is going to be a breeze. This week i handed in a Japanese assignment and a horrible international studies essay that made me realise again how little i know. Only needed to be 2000 words but I sat there stuck on 1200 words checking the word count every 2 minutes expecting it to miraculously go up. Didnt. Either way finally got it done and handed it in today. Now i only have 2 more assignments left and they are both in media! Which is fun! and suspiciously easy.

For the Networked media assignment i COULD make a datavisualisation.....but this geonarrative seems like way more fun and im very excited at how it could turn out.
So my decision is im doing the Lord of the Rings story as a parody in modern times but with many elements from the actual story. Its going to be set around Canberra and each major location in the story will be substituted by a suburb or area in Canberra. However im still going through and trying to remember if there are any places in canberra that could be good for certain locations in the Lord of The Rings. The geonarrative is going to follow the travels of each of the characters over all three books and the problems and events they encounter. I already have some people who are keen to help act out my pictures.
Im also going to include small videos of re-enactments of certain parts if its possible. Im not too sure though that say if i use some Lord of The Rings music for part of a re-enactment it is counted as copyright. Or alternatively if i played the music myself on a guitar? Because the scene that im thinking is going to be absolutely pricless if i can use the music.
Im very excited to make this. If everything goes smoothly and people act good, it could be the best thing ive ever created.

Datavisualisation

NINJAS! I changed my template. This is what im all about haha.
Anyway we had our last lecture this week. I'm glad Michael made it probably the most interesting one we have had too. He talked about datavisualisations, which i have no idea why i didnt know about these things before. These things are just amazing. Informative and interesting. We looked at heaps in the lecture and some in our tutorial. We Feel Fine was a very cool looking one that was shown in our class. The one i found was about what people are doing in Japan at the moment. Kinda useless right now, unless for some reason i have the urge to find out how many people in Tokyo are playing a sport at 6:00pm. Otherwise all the datavis' were really cool.
We have an option for an upcoming assignment to either do a datavisualisation or a geomappy thingo story on google maps using photos. I have decided to do on google maps The Lord of the Rings story based around canberra and its suburbs. Ha! Its gonna be fun times getting the photos.

Pimp My City

We saw some real interesting stuff in our lecture on tuesday. Our topic was multiplicity and using collective intelligence. We were shown this thing called The 1K Project and i thought it was pretty cool. Sooo much time would have gone into this though. Its shows 1000 cars travelling this race track on a game but taking different paths and looks amazing. We were also shown this really interesting clip from ted.com which displays some new technology in relation to photos and it is really worth checking out.

Today in class we had to come up with ideas website that harnessed collective intelligence to create some kind of cool. Our group came up with a thing we called Digicity. A site where people submit thier designs of buildings or constructs found in a city onto a database. Once submitted the computer would then render the image to a 3D model. People can then filter through many different and original models or structures to build their own city (Pimp My City). So thats the basic gist of it. Anyone can submit a design, so it isnt limited to architects with degrees. It gives those creative folk a chance to show their style. People can also comment on which designs look best. The idea was made in about 10 mins so not a huge amount of detail yet. However this idea could also be a good scouting place for people who are looking for ideas and architects. There is so much left to put together on how this site would work and all the technical stuff to it but at the moment my brain is probably on lvl 4 and this requires a lvl 20.
So if i ever was gonna and try and make a mad money making site..unlikely but you never know. We shall copyright this idea...Ha! Id sell it to those willing though. I also thought when everyone was presenting thier ideas that university teachers could be the biggest idea snakes ever. Although they would probably get into some kind of trouble.

Back to business

So a lecture in the arvo, after a couple of classes earlier in the day (one at 8:30am), first day back after a little holiday felt as good as it sounds. About a 1.
The highlight of the lecture for me was when Michael went to a site called Twistori as an example of some of the stuff he was teaching us. I wouldnt have minded if we all just sat there watching peoples posts come up waiting for some funny ones.

In the lecture we learnt about WEB 2.0...why 2.0? The 2.0 is associated with the change of a new era and things becoming more stylish and appealing. With the way everything has been going why not name it iWeb 2.0. HA! iSnack 2.0 Vegemite. What a fail. Had to be renamed into Cheesybite because everyone thought it was crap. Bet that was a massive kick to the balls of whoever made the first name.
Anyway web 2.0 reflects the design patterns and models for the next generation of software. Michael summed it up pretty well. Cute shiny slidy stuff. So everything is really getting smaller. My camera is about the same size as my phone. And with new technology and designs i forsee the next generation being full of the laziest kids. In years i may be telling a story to my grandkids about playing halo 1 on the xbox with friends and seeing the confusion on their faces when i try to teach them what a cord is and how they used to plug into the xbox. And that your friends would be sitting next to you, not at thier house using the internet to play so they didnt have to ride over and breathe the outside air. But they would probably laugh at me and call me crazy, making up such things as cords, so id go weep in a rocking chair thinking about my youth till i fell asleep.
So we also learnt about the Network Effect aka Metcalfes law.
Cost:N
Value:N squared
The more people that use a service, the more valuable it becomes. (The creators of google nod while fending off muggers with a pure gold katana).
And as things become more popular, ways are created to make things more efficient. For example from the use and times a page has been searched, google filters which pages are most important and informative and makes them easier available by putting the earlier on the list. This is called Page Rank.

Another thing we learn in the lecture was about the LONG TAIL.
Visit google trends and look something up. Pretty clever thing actually. So in relation to a book. The example in the lecture was Touching the Void which is about some mountaineers climbing big snowy mountains. I actually saw this documantary/drama in college or highschool. Anyway the long tail relates to the long part of a graph after the first massive surge of popularity and during the constant or gradually declining line somehow some more popularity is sparked. Touching the Void was revived by the release of 'Into Thin Air' and appeared on Amazons other related genres list which made people want it again. Just goes to show that stuff can make a comeback after its been long forgotten...just like the 'One Ring' in Lord of the Rings. Once that was found again all bloody Middle Earth went beserk...hahaha im done. And yes i did watch it in my break.