Planning for learning agreement

Following on from this post and work I've started to do on this blog I've finally got a idea for what I want to produce for the learning agreement and assessed work.

25 proposals for work, these will cover all aspects of research I've done. They should range from practical considerations for producing online work to more experimental ideas.

At this stage I think the final piece should paper based, possibly a book. With the blog documenting the research and development of the work.

Some constraints: each proposal should fit onto one A4 sheet.

The Futuresonic brouche is really good format, and interesting starting point to start working from
http://www.futuresonic.com/08/schedule/

I also like the proposal papers from MIT.

Notes from tutorial with Graham

Outcomes
Roles
Confusion
Unclear
The best online gallery
Smaller pieces
Uplaod tools
Algorithms
YouTube Flickr case studies, redesign of smaller sections
Curation
Illusion of users making choices
Forcing users to make decisions
Upload one image at a time
Upload one image at a day
Meta data
Tagging
Preparing, cataloguing, archiving work for later
How does this differ from what a gallery curator does anyway
How does this differ from what a web designer does anyway
How does this differ from what a graphic designer does anyway
Final outcomes
Paper, screen, code, text
Big box of stuff
Mapping users
Narrowing down
Unexpected
Making my life easier
"I'm trying to avoid the obvious idea of creating a website, my role should be broader than that" key question ?

teacakedesign

This was submitted to NOISE a couple of weeks ago
EATeacake
I don't know why but I really like it, it's pretty straightforward site design (portfolio and blog) I think it was submitted to the graphics section but I just love the whole Factory(both Saville/Wilson and manufacturing)/northwest/ concept/ collective idea.

It's also giving me some ideas for presenting the learning agreement

Work space

Ressurected this old blog to use as somewhere to start putting work ideas, visual stuff. I'm thinking of putting together 25(?) rough ideas/ proposals for website designs, interactive pieces and ideas.

I'll continuing using this blog for reserach and learning agreement.

BBC Sound Index

Sound index

Below is some info about the BBCs Sound Index, there's some interesting ideas about searching for new music and new work. How do you profile users and what people are searching for and listening to but it still comes down to the most popular, most viewed, most downloaded. After a while does it become narrowed down to music and genres you know you like without finding something unexpected?

The Sound Index is a massive index of the hottest bands and tracks that are being talked about on the internet right now.

Every six hours the Sound Index crawls some of the biggest music sites on the internet - Bebo, MySpace, Last.FM, iTunes, Google and YouTube - to find out what people are writing about, listening to, watching, downloading and logging on to. It then counts and analyses this data to make an instant list of the most popular 1000 artists and tracks on the web. The more blog mentions, comments, plays, downloads and profile views an artist or track has, the higher up the Sound Index they are. So, the Sound Index is a music buzz index controlled entirely by the public.

As we know which artists are being enjoyed by which people, not only can you can filter the Sound Index to reflect the sites you use the most, or your favourite music styles, you can also tailor it to represent the views of people of different ages and locations.

All the demographic data we collect and use is entirely anonymous, so we can never attribute any age or location data to any specific person. So, if you are a user of any of these sites, you don't need to worry that the Sound Index has any information about you. However, if you are concerned, or want more details, please contact us at soundindex@bbc.co.uk.

You can also watch some of the newest bands hottest new tracks on Sound, the music show on BBC every Saturday.

The Sound Index is currently in a public service beta phase, with data sources being finalised. During this beta phase we shall also be implementing and tweaking the data currently in the Index, and investigating a weighting system, to allow the more active forms of interaction to contribute more heavily to the Index.

Futuresonic festival Manchester

The Futuresonic festival in Manchester in a couple of weeks, looks really interesting and relevant to my current reserach and work. I'm trying to book tickets for the two day technology conference
Futuresonic
Below is the theme for this year festival

Computers have become social interfaces for sharing digital media and collaborating to build online communities and folksonomies. Some technologies are more social than others. Social technologies are bottom up and many-to-many instead of one-to-one or one-to-many. They can include technologies created and maintained by social networks, such as communities of developers and users working collaboratively with open source tools.

At the same time we see how electronic communication can isolate us, as more and more people drown in a deluge of email that generates stress, even reducing IQ. Additionally, 'online communities' are based upon an artificial equivalence between 'users' which obscures power relationships and issues of ownership.

This runs much deeper than online social networking websites alone. When you use your credit card, you are using a social technology. Each time we buy something we let the company know where we are and what we are buying. An electronic profile is created for each one of us and the aggregated information is used to shape services and select the products on the shelves. This in turn shapes the choices available to us, and the society we live in.

The city is also being transformed. In one moment we can be sat on a bench, logged on to a wireless node in the park, and roaming through the virtual space of the internet, chatting intimately to people many thousands of miles away. The nature of the public sphere, as a place where people can congregate and meet, is changing. We need to conceive of new kinds of architecture, where a fleeting experience of city space is entangled with the folksonomies of the web.

Futuresonic plans to pull out the plug in order to take the new social spaces apart, see how they work, and put them together in new ways. It will explore the seam between open source culture and the public sphere in the city, and in a return to the pioneering early days of the internet, people will be able to build their own spaces to meet, hang out and chat.

MA space

Returning to old ideas from over the last 18 months.
I'm looking at ways of people searching and finding work on the MA space. I want a sort of anti "Amazon reccomends", so you find unexpected work but has some relevance to work you've done or looked at in the past. Not just a random selection.
For example on Amazon reccomends if you skipped the first few links of what they reccomend to you and are given the a list of things five links down the chain.

This is pretty rough idea what I need to do is start to visaulize this in some way.

Professional Practice 2.0

I'm really thinking/ (struggling?) with what to produce in terms of "graphic design" for the MA. I'm also trying to figure out what I want to do in October once the MA is over...

Is what Jeff Jarvis does at www.buzzmachine.com media, communication, new media, design, consultancy?

Giving up the day job can pay off
# Jeff Jarvis
# The Guardian,
# Monday April 14 2008

I wouldn't even argue if there is a job in this area of media/design clearly there is. I do similar things at NOISE developing social networks, trying to engage users. So it's not the lack of work. It's defining it, selling it to people. The more I think about it and work on ideas I'm starting to think whatever I do is based in communication design. Social networks, user generated content, conectting people, mapping. This is what my work should show.

Current reading: Sonic Boom: Napster, P2P and the Battle for the Future of Music

Sonic Boom: Napster, P2P and the Battle for the Future of Music

Whats most interesting is reading about something that happened less then a decade a go but seems a life time ago in terms of technology but with little change in attitude from the record industry. Or am I being cynical and obvious.

Digital music: The genie's out of the bottle
Labels take note: unless changes are made, the day the music sales died might not be very far off.

There seems to have been a massive shift in terms of technology yet the recording industry still seems to be to taking the same approach as 10 years ago, in terms of stopping file sharing. There's some interesting comparisons to how a large media organisation, such as the BBC for example, has approached distributing it's content across multiple platforms. There has been a shift in terms of downloadable content but the recent news stories about Internet providers having to supply details of file sharers, all seems a bit like de ja vu whilst reading this book.

Carphone Warehouse rejects music police

“It’s between the user and them, it’s not to do with us. My lawyer explained it to me: it is like trying to prosecute the bus company that takes a shoplifter to the shops,” Mr Dunstone said

Next up is:

The Future of Music: Manifesto for the Digital Music Revolution

When Old Technologies Were New: Thinking About Electric Communication in the Late Nineteenth Century

Communicating Design: Developing Web Site Documentation for Design and Planning

Ideas for presenting concepts and designs

Neck Edge

Interesting

Amazon.com Statistically Improbable Phrases

Amazon.com's Statistically Improbable Phrases, or "SIPs", are the most distinctive phrases in the text of books in the Search Inside!™ program. To identify SIPs, our computers scan the text of all books in the Search Inside! program. If they find a phrase that occurs a large number of times in a particular book relative to all Search Inside! books, that phrase is a SIP in that book.

SIPs are not necessarily improbable within a particular book, but they are improbable relative to all books in Search Inside!. For example, most SIPs for a book on taxes are tax related. But because we display SIPs in order of their improbability score, the first SIPs will be on tax topics that this book mentions more often than other tax books. For works of fiction, SIPs tend to be distinctive word combinations that often hint at important plot elements.

Click on a SIP to view a list of books in which the phrase occurs. You can also view a list of references to the phrase in each book. Learn more about the phrase by clicking on the A9.com search link.

Have some ideas for improving this feature? Please send your feedback to sitb-feedback@amazon.com