We've been asked to discuss the pros, cons and current trends regarding multimedia usage on web pages.  Multimedia meaning in this case, the incorporation of more than one medium of communication such as video, music, Flash, and so on.

My immediate gut response, that multimedia implementation has increased substantially throughout the web, is aided somewhat by the page I'm typing this entry into, which has convenient buttons at the top to enable me to include images or embed media. I think I'll use the former now.

Interestingly, as I try to upload the photo originally as a bitmap, an error message informs me that there are only four supported image types, and .bmp ain't one of them.  Clearly, this multimedia movement is still new in many ways. But it is becoming more and more prevalent.

Hypothetical situation: You're bored one afternoon while waiting for your next class.  You've got ten minutes to go, which is just enough time to make leaving for somewhere else pointless, while making twiddling your thumbs become new record in the Guinness Book of World Records.  So you browse to YouTube, and check out some old favorite, or see what new gems are waiting to be found. YouTube, a site designed around the inclusion of multimedia was so successful that Google bought it out.  As an added bonus, they include visible code on each video page so that you can link to or embed it on a web page of your own.

Clearly, some of the advantages of using multimedia are that it's flashy (in some cases, just Flash) and attracts a lot of users.  Unfortunately, there's such a thing as too much of something good. Adding multimedia is uncommonly a simple or easy process.  Here in LiveJournal, they have a GUI to do this for you, but it generates code that can be tricky to recall offhand. Embedding video and audio usually necessitates scripting in a player of some sort, and managing all the variables that go along with that (view this source).  It will also undoubtedly increase the load times for the page on which the multimedia gets used, hindering the expereince of those users who still have a slower connection.  Finally, YouTube has had many copyright infringement claims filed against them for possible misuse of copyrighted material.


And yet despite this, Google chose to absorb the pending lawsuits, and purchase YouTube anyway.  It seems clear that in the minds of some, the benefits far outweight the consequences.

Tags: embedding, multimedia

On Monday, we had the opportunity to listen to guest speaker Mr. Lewis Smith. Mr. Smith spoke to the class about his experiences in the field of online communication. He also advised us on the skill sets and process of development that are crucial to creating professional online content

The two things that stuck with me the most were his iterative, sequential work process for creating a web product for a client, and his extensively detailed site architecture diagrams. Having developed a website for a class before, I can say with certainty that these are steps that cannot be skipped or minded only superficially. Both of these precursor steps revolve around understanding the functionality as well as the limitations of designing a web site a particular way (what the site will and will not be). This helps ensure that all parties are on the same page; as Mr. Lewis indicated, it is sometimes the case that the person who directly discusses with the client what the product is that they want, is not always the person who goes and codes the website.

Mr. Smith spoke extensively about the first step in the process: discovery. This is the time where the client is questioned extensively about what they want in, and from, their website. Included among the standard queries about what the site should do and what it might look like, are questions such as how the success of the website will be measured. Discovery is perhaps the most important step because it is the part of the process where the developers will get the best understanding of the client's vision. The better they understand them now, the fewer time-consuming and expensive revisions must be made later.

What I personally found most appealing about Mr. Lewis' discussion was how what I heard served to reinforce things I already knew; it's a good feeling to think that you've finally got some real-world, marketable skills. Aside from owning at StarCraft.

Tags: lewis smith, web development process

Last class, we were given the opportunity to hear a presentation on metadata for the web from resident librarian Jeremy Donald.  Additionally, we were tasked with reading this "web style guide" which was a laundry list of do's and don'ts to consider when constructing a website.

Jeremy's presentation was solid; he raised several relevant points about the uses and misuses of material posted to the web.  Of particular interest was the image he brought in of an artist's rendering of what the web would look like all mapped out.  It really underscores the notion that the world wide web is incomprehensible in volume, and that doesn't even include this "dark web" – web pages that are blocked behind passwords, firewalls or other exclusion criteria.  Also of keen interest was his acknowledgement of porn and the tremendous number of masturbators that each of those ip's might represent.  Dark web indeed, Mr. Donald. The sheer volume of the web as portrayed segued nicely into the need for relevant metadata, or to use Jeremy's phrase, data about data.  He even went so far as to accredit the web as being a potentially more user-comfortable medium for research than a library proper, citing "library anxiety" as being prohibitive to many would-be consumers of information.

He raises good points about the need for very accurate metadata to support an efficient search methodology to keep up with the continually increasing amount of information (both light and dark) available on the web.  The next article (see above) details appropriate measures, mentalities and behaviors for constructing a professional website. A summary of a summary of ideas seems wasteful, but might be stated directly as: "More of the same."

It isn't that the site doesn't outline or detail important concepts that one (or many) should keep in mind when constructing their own website, it's just that none of the points they raised seemed to fall outside the category of 'common sense.'  They are quite helpful in compiling such a thorough list, and it is true that websites should fit their users rather than serve their creators sense of aesthetics, but especially to someone who has spent most of this class already investigating the things that one should or should not do when conceiving a web site design.

What I am for more curious about is when we'll get to the actual web site making.  I realize that fools rush in, but I think we've splashed around in the kiddie pool long enough – it's time to get more than our feet wet.

Tags: jeremy donald, web style guide

This is a reflection on Dr. Vannevar Bush's 1945 article "As We May Think." He would've gone with "As I Lay Dying" but Faulkner beat him to it. Shame, too, because Dr. Bush's fable, despite an insistence on skullduggerous technical detail, was far more enthralling. Oh, it also happened. Eat it, Faulkner.

That's right, more than sixty years ago, a doctor trained in the science and understanding of the era hypothesizes the origins of Microsoft's Encarta. Extrapolating on technology actually available, Dr. Bush constructs a strange but familiar version of the modern workstation complete with Wikipedia homepage. If you think that his notions are implausible leaps of imagination, try to remember that Isaac Asimov was also doing a bit of writing at the time.

Dr. Bush recognizes a concept that all contemporary students are well-acquainted with: there's too much damn reading to do. Dr. Bush points out that the voluminous amount of publications simply number too many to be meaningfully absorbed by anyone wanting to get a comprehensive view on what was quickly becoming almost any topic. Science was expanding too quickly. Bush's solution handles not only a method for compressing data, but for recalling it quickly (at the press of a button, in fact) and, to use his word, linking to other data meaningfully. The closeness with which Dr. Bush has approximated modern conventions of things like wikis and blogs is staggering. Even voice recognition protocol is beginning to become more commonplace (see VOIP).

The only thing out of place in Dr. Bush's vision seems to be the levers. One is left to assume that he is an avid gamer of the piloting genre. Three cheers for Dr. Vannevar Bush. Where would we be without all the joysticks?

Tags: as we may think, the ability to see into the future, vannevar bush

Welcome to my original 3344 blog. If you've found your way here from Trinity's TLEARN page, it isn't a mistake. I created this blog as a requirement of taking Virtual World Promotions with Dr. Delwiche in the Spring '07 semester. (There seems to be a calling for better blog comprehension among students from the department or at least the professors of COMM 3344 classes.) Previous postings with a title of [VWP] refer to this class, and it isn't so bad that I feel the need to create a whole new blog on a new site. Feel free to peruse previous entries if you should get stood up and truly have nothing better to do.

In case you're wondering, "Impirator" is my gamer persona. If you ever get stomped in The Sims Online or Hello Kitty Island Adventures by someone bearing that title, rest assured that it was someone else. I play real games like Starcraft and World of Warcraft.

'Keylime Pye' was the name of my avatar from Virtual World Promotions.  I tried to make the best of the limited set of last names available.  Obviously, I rule.

I will repost the original blog entry from the TLEARN site below for sake of completeness.

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XHTML, PHP, JS, WTF?

Hooray for the first entry in a new class blog. The first thing you should do is read my profile to get a sense with which to read my entries. Another thing you can do is read my previous class blog (curiously also for a COMM 3344 class) here.

Assuming that you do read my former blog, even a little, you'll realize that I've already immersed myself quite a bit into the art and science of the www. When you think about how much there is to know, my experience really doesn't make me a virtuoso on the subject. However, I am hopeful to take away more from this class than an understanding of how to close tags.

I have two websites that I like to take partial responsibility for:

• TigerTV's webpage—notice how up to date it is
• Slueth3D—the result of my previous COMM 3344 adventure

The first is a project I inherited from someone else, who had created and maintained it until they moved on to better things (commonly known as 'graduation'). In defense of it's out-of-date condition, I have no way to access and update it over the summer, and the managers haven't met yet to tell me what they want changed or updated. The other site is much more my own creation, and is the end result of the efforts of last semester's COMM 3344 crew. I say that it's the result of the efforts of that class, but really the site itself boils down to me and one other, the extremely talented and positively radiant Kathryn Cornelius. She is responsible for the site design, and has the rare talent of bending Photoshop to her will. With her mind. The keyboard just gets in her way. If you like the way the site looks, it's all her, and if you like what it does, it's me.

This touches upon the heart of what I want out of this class – and why I was so disappointed to hear that we wouldn't be designing inside web building programs. I agree very much that the fundamentals of HTML should be understood, and what can go wrong without a good grasp of the basics, but after that, there are a great many things that can be gained from using a program like Photoshop (or Dreamweaver, though I prefer the former). Chief among them are the beauty and grace that Kathryn transfers from herself to her creation.

With this in mind, here are three things I would like to take away from this class.
–An ability to craft professional looking sites
–A better grasp of scripting (ASP, PHP, javascript, ActionScript, etc.)
–XML, CSS, advanced uses for HTML

The application of any of these has a highly professional aspect to it. Despite the widespread adage "never judge a book by it's cover" many people do just this every day. The same way a lawyer would be quite out of place delivering his opening arguments in a Hawaiian shirt on, so too would flashy images and sparkling cursors be on that law firm's homepage. Indeed, unlike changing attorneys mid-trial, it is very easy to redirect your browser from a page that is unprofessional (or even uninteresting) to one more suitable. Then you don't even hire Hawaiian lawyer in the first place, which is okay, because he'd rather be sipping Mojitos anyway.

Tags: new blog, new class

This is the final blog entry for this class.  We've been asked to look back on our time spent, and reflect on what we've done.  To be completely honest, I feel like as many things went well as they did poorly.

The Good:
Working on this project has, in my opinion given me a good feel for what it would be like to actually work on a project of similar scale and direction professionally.  I feel like the size, communication and time devoted to work could potentially reflect that of an actual real world job.  Additionally, and although it lacks complete functionality (yet, hopefully), the website is a tremendous achievement on our behalf, and is something I genuinely believe would provide a much needed service for a growing community of Second Life users and developers.

The Bad:
Despite how it came (sort of) together at the end, there was a lot of unclarity about the direction the project would take.  This meant that ultimately much of the actual developmental work on the website specifically would be crammed into the final weeks (notably finals week proper).  Unlike a job, where people would be paid for their skills, the skills and capabilities of our coworkers are not guaranteed.  As a result, a huge amount of the work fell to those who already knew what they were doing, and nobody else on the team made any real effort to assist.  I will state this explicitly to ensure that there is no mistake, if it weren't for Kathryn C. and myself, I do not believe this project would have even been feasible.  In point of fact, I expressed this precise concern at the beginning of the semester.  Additionally, the sheer volume of daily e-mails I felt was quite unnecessary.  I feel that that mailing list could've been used for group-wide messages, and that for specific groups or even personal correspondence, a folder in the under-appreciated googlegroups page would've been much more appropriate.

Ultimately, I have mixed feelings about this class in retrospect.  While there were some serious issues that I don't feel were handled well, I do feel like we came together to make something really pretty good.  I wish there was some established plan of continuance, but both the professor and many of the students are leaving next semester so who knows.  At the very least, it doesn't look so bad on the résumé.

[Edit:]  I wanted to add that I feel like this class is good thing.  Companies and people really are moving into Second Life and heading into social virtual worlds.  They are a growing construct, and it is not at all trivial to assume that one can just apply the same methods of building something in real life to building something in a virtual world.  But this class needs to address that more directly.  We didn't get started on the actual project until a good ways into the semester, and even then I there were a few weeks where we were sort of theorizing about a project and sort of reading papers and publications about Second Life and virtual worlds.  I think it needs to come down to pick one or the other, or integrate the two better.  Some of the papers were interesting, and others were absolutely unnecessary (or repetitive).  I had to upload my midterm from London, England, and I'm not sure at this point why I bothered.  Distill out the things that worked and emphasize them.  This is not like your standard class, to be sure, and about 60% - 70% worked pretty well.  Trim the fat, and it'll be one hell of a class in the future.

Tags: final

The topic of the day is, "How have you contributed to the class project?"  Let me get straight to it.
Here: Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix.  Now I've contributed.

As far as contributions go towards completing the overall group project, I think I am the record holder for greatest number of people prevented from working due to my absence.  I've had many a Wednesday nights (and indeed time in general) taken away due to rehearsals for Trinity's main stage production, The Madwoman of Chaillot (hope you got the chance to see it, it was excellent, props to all cast and crew).  In response to that timesink, most of my work has been done away from the public eye and in the black of night, occasionally into the wee hours of dawn.  Unfortunately, the majority of this time has been spent either learning about PHP and MySQL directly, or indirectly when the knowledge I supposedly gathered from online instructions and offline "bibles," volumes and tomes throws an exception at runtime.

In spite of everything, I have managed to actually produce some work for the group benefit.  I did some initial HTML modeling to create a rudimentary form for people to look at and respond to.  I'll also take credit for the architecture diagram (conceptual system design) for the implementation of our virtual network, as there was no one on the web team who loved doodling on the whiteboard more than I did (can I get a round of applause for the "teammate" who magnificently erased the only needed code I put up there?  Backstabber).  I helped Manny get the in-world "televator" (teleporter-elevator) operational.  Eventually I even managed to set up the database structure on GoDaddy.com and enough scripts to send information to the database and get stuff back from it.  Sometimes, even the same stuff submitted in the first place.  I'm currently trying to expand the scripts to implement some developer-friendly tools for ease of use, but even without the actual play still being in production, the lost time is catching up with me fast on all fronts, and I have approximately 913 things to get done for various classes in the upcoming two days.  In retrospect, it would've been nice to have someone else able to work tag-team with me on the database stuff.  I suppose I'd feel worse about not getting more things done for the database, except that most database admins don't also have four other classes and a director's farewell piece de resistance to participate in (we'll miss you Dr. Rinear).  At the most, their extra duties include not getting killed by the level 20 dragon guarding the way to their girlfriend's apartment.  Fathers can be so meddlesome.  Not a great excuse, but hopefully one that counts for something.  For the record, of all the work I have left to do in the semester, this is far and away the class I'd prefer to focus on.

I'm not sure that I had any direct hand in the marketing aspects of the site.  Except to say that LAIM would've been the greatest thing ever, and you've all made a terrible mistake here.  Terrible.

Tags: failure, horrible failure
Current Location: Prassel
Current Mood: busy
Current Music: lots

This is an examination of the articles reviewed by one of my colleagues over spring break.  Ozat_folly, or as he's known in a few, remote circles, Patrick, analyzed three articles: “It’s an Ad, Ad, Ad, Ad World,” “Improving Online dating with virtual dates,” and “Atmospherics." Excerpt from Coercion: Why We Listen to What 'They' Say. (pp. 65-98).”

While it was clear from his reviews and bullets that Patrick had in fact read the articles assigned, the summaries seemed on the meager side.  We happened to share a common article (we were both assigned the "Improving Online Dating..." article), and I noted that his summary wasn't wrong but it was very sparse, particularly given the length of the article.  As for the other two, it seemed that the reviews only scratched the surface; I was left wanting to know more about the summarized information.  Perhaps that is the mark of a good summary--to entice the reader into reading it's source, but I would have preferred to have gotten more from his reviews.  I tend to be more verbose, so perhaps Patrick's notations were just right.  In contrast however, Pat's insight as to how the lessons of the articles could be applied towards our class project were quite good.  As these are ultimately the point of why we'd read the articles anyway, they nicely compensated for the bare-bones article notes.

Tags: ozat_folly, second life articles

I've used Pat's Google personalized homepage solution, as he described last class on the projector.

For my blog choices I've got 3pointD, In the grid, Second Life News Notes, New World Notes.

Current Location: London, UK

Title:  Improve Online Dating with Virtual Dates

Article authors:  Jeana H. Frost, Michael I. Norton, Dan Ariely 

Full citation:  Frost, Norton and Ariely (2006). “Improving Online Dating With Virtual Dates.” Social Science Research Network. 

Summary by:  Michael Elder

Key concepts, terms, and buzzwords:

• Dating
• Online dating
• Online dating dissatisfaction
• Virtual dates
  

Summary:
This paper is a scientific/statistical examination of the realm of online dating.  The authors quickly point out that the internet is a readily effective measure for forming platonic relationships.  Then why, they ask, does “anecdotal evidence” indicate widespread unhappiness with the same medium used to attempt romantic relationships?

Tags: dating, online dating, online dating disenchantment, virtual dates
Current Location: London, UK