after the break

hello. welcome back. hope you had a nice easter break. for the first session after the break we will have the much anticipated lecture by andrea rota (see post below for link to his profile) on creative commons and free culture.

Andrea Rota guest lecturer

hello. this thursday the session will be divided into two parts.
The first half will be your presentations (guidelines here

We will have a guest: Andrea Rota Andrea is part of CELTA (The Centre for Excellence in Learning Technology at the Goldsmiths College). you can read about his interests here:
http://www.gold.ac.uk/learning/about/staff.html
Andrea will give you feedback on your research portfolios and for the second part, he will talk about the creative commons licensing schemes and free culture.

Mashup: Jukeboxtube

Cool of the cool: the jukebox tube http://jukeboxtube.com/ A jukebox-like playlist for YouTube videos. No need to listen to your own MP3s when YouTube already has everything online. (via http://www.programmableweb.com where you can find a huge list of other mashups.  Mashups are web-based applications that aggregate visual interfaces such as Google maps, Youtube) or data, from other web applications or sites and recombine these components as required to meet a specific purpose… read more about it here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mashup_(web_application_hybrid)

Hype Machine

Check this out: Hype Machine. This is a really cool meta-sound-blog, a sort of aggregator of all music blogs on the web: The Hype Machine follows music blog discussions and tracks its MP3 posts. If a post contains MP3 links, it adds those links to its database and displays them on the front page. Hypem uses the XSPF Web Music Player (Flash) – that you can download  to play MP3s on your website. It would be worth checking it out and see how it works with blogger and wordpress platforms.

web 2 going 3

Web 3.0: When Web Sites Become Web Services  by Alex Iskold is an update source of info for your research project on web 2.0. Read it for an interesting discussion of the impact of concepts we have been discussing in our sessions (such as the flow of microcontent via rss ) into the future of the web. Much of what is discussed in future terms is already part of our social media sphere so make sure you understand how it works and comment on it when you’re writing your production analysis.

web 2.0

In his article Web 2.0: A New Wave of Innovation for Teaching and Learning? Bryan Alexander outlines what he considers are the three main concepts for the web 2.0. These are:

social software is a development of `’using networked computing to connect people in order to boost their knowledge and aility to learn” ( JCR LickLider, 1960s), as in listservs, usenet groups, discussion software, groupware and web-based communities. Recent web projects: blogs, wikis, trackback, podcasting, videoblogs. Its about user modification, timeliness( reverse-chronological structure). Not abreak from web 1.0 but the emergence of a new type of practice.

microcontent is a development of web 1.0 as well. It involves collaboration and sharing such as in: Email messages, discussion-board posts,, usenet-hosted images, text messages. But web 2.0 builds on this original microcontent drive, with users developing webcontent, often collaboratively and ofetn oopen to the world.” (bryan alexander). Web not as a book but as microcontent blocks. not webpages, but postblogs. These content blocks are shuttled between web sites thought RSS feeds, and diverse players and built into new projects.

openness is a distinctive factor of web 2.0 both ideologically and technologically, characterised by a two-way access. Its ideological difference from web 1.0 resides in the creative and active role given to web users, as creators of (micro) content. Technogically this is possible due to social software such as wikis and social bookmarking, as in flicker.com, with users tagging the information with personal keywords.

According to Bryan Alexander, ” taken together, this set of concepts informs a way of making, sharing, and consuming digital documents” that pinpoint to an emergent group of practices that are crucially more important than any label can account for.

rules to blog-writing

I found this set of rules to make your site more readable at the digital web magazine.
The article Does Your Copy Hold Up To A Quick Glance? by Jessica Neuman Beck outlines these rules that you may want to apply to make your blog easier to read.

1- Break It Up: “Give your words some breathing room by increasing your margins, and choose short, concise chunks of information over long, solid blocks of text. At a glance, short paragraphs seem more accessible than longer ones.”;

2- A Place For Everything: “Paragraph breaks are great, but organizing information into sections is even better. Assign headlines to each chunk of related copy. Headlines are the page scanner’s best friend; they make it easy to decide which sections to read and which can be skipped.”;

3-Worth a Thousand Words: “Break up your pages and give readers a visual cue as to what they can expect by using images and illustrations—but use them wisely.Make sure your graphics are proportionate to the rest of the body text. Huge images that take up most of the screen not only convey very little about the subject, they also keep readers from your content. Don’t assume that everyone will scroll below the fold.”;

4-It’s All About the Flow:”The way people view web pages has a definite pattern to it.That means that the top, left, and middle of your article gets the most play, and the rest of it needs to work if it’s going to be noticed.”;

5-Feel the Heat(maps):”Want to keep the eye moving in the right direction? Put your most important point at the beginning of your article. Follow it with bite-sized chunks of information that hold up to a quick scan. Keep the flow by using familiar visual cues (easy-to-recognize links and navigation elements) and use recognizable icons and styles to draw attention to easily overlooked areas.”;

rules to blog-writing

I found this set of rules to make your site more readable at the digital web magazine. the article Does Your Copy Hold Up To A Quick Glance? by Jessica Neuman Beck outlines these rules that you may want to apply to make your blog easier to read: 1- Break It Up: “Give your words some breathing room by increasing your margins, and choose short, concise chunks of information over long, solid blocks of text. At a glance, short paragraphs seem more accessible than longer ones.”; 2- A Place For Everything and Everything in Its Place: “Paragraph breaks are great, but organizing information into sections is even better. Assign headlines to each chunk of related copy. Headlines are the page scanner’s best friend; they make it easy to decide which sections to read and which can be skipped.”; 3-Worth a Thousand Words (So Make Sure You’re Not Speaking Gibberish):”Break up your pages and give readers a visual cue as to what they can expect by using images and illustrations—but use them wisely.Make sure your graphics are proportionate to the rest of the body text. Huge images that take up most of the screen not only convey very little about the subject, they also keep readers from your content. Don’t assume that everyone will scroll below the fold.”;4-It’s All About the Flow:”The way people view web pages has a definite pattern to it.That means that the top, left, and middle of your article gets the most play, and the rest of it needs to work if it’s going to be noticed.”; 5-Feel the Heat(maps):”Want to keep the eye moving in the right direction? Put your most important point at the beginning of your article. Follow it with bite-sized chunks of information that hold up to a quick scan. Keep the flow by using familiar visual cues (easy-to-recognize links and navigation elements) and use recognizable icons and styles to draw attention to easily overlooked areas.”;

what’s your blog type?

Hi,  Robin Hamman from  cybersoc.com has come up with this method for looking at blogs. according to his text ( and slide presentation available at flickr), there are 3 types of blog: closed, conduit and participant in the conversation. Take a look at the diagrams and the descriptions for each type of blog and see which model does your blog belong to?

a + b = ba ? [art + blog = blogart?]

this interesting call for proposals has just arrived through my ebox. check it out and let me know what you think. i collaborated with java museum /[NewMediaArtProjectNetwork] in the sound project memoryscapes
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Theme:a + b = ba ? [art + blog = blogart?] Deadline 2 July 2007
JavaMuseum is starting its 2nd phase by publishing on open call focussing on the question whether blogs and/or blogging can be tools for creating
a new type of net based art. The launch of this new project in September 2007 is planned to be also the occasion for re-launching JavaMuseum after a phase of re-structuring since 2005. JavaMuseum – Forum for Internet Technology in Contemporary Art, founded in 2000, realized during the 1st phase (2001-2005) 18 show cases focussing on Internet based art in a global context, including more than 350 artists from 40 countries. In this way, JavaMuseum was able to show for the first time the dimension of Internet based art as a new and individual art genre, even if it is continously said to be dead. For a + b = ba?, JavaMuseum is inviting artists to submit such an art project in form of a blog. The entry details, regulations and entry form can be found on http://netex.nmartproject.net/index.php?blog=8&cat=54