Philmilne’s Weblog

For my elected three blog entries, I choose my entry about the semantic web, my entry about datavisualisation and my entry which talks about my project B RoadFacts. I want to use this last one because I;m not sure i eluded to the key idea of uncovering trends in datavisualisation.

I was a litle unsure what was expected from our student blogs and where i stand compared to other students. As for my audience, I’m pretty sure very few people actually looked at my blog, this could be because of my lack of structure in terms of content, it could be because it’s only relatively new. The content was based on no particular topic, but with a few posts towards the latter stages which were study related. The concepts i wrote about genuinely interested me.

The links that i have on my site are mainly made by myself, my pipe, my lastest assessment, and sites i find interesting – somethingawful.com. In terms of social media sources i used delicious a few times, mainly to keep track of some of my classmates blogs, to bookmark interesting sites and also to expand my knowledge of relevant topics. This last use was rare, but it did happen.

My blog has potnetial as a part of Networked Media to keep people informed of my travels, like a travelogue of my life, but the audience for such a venture is very limited. For it to become a mre commonly viewed medium i would have to focus on a particular topic, the nature of my blog for the last 15 weeks or so, has been erratic and featured big events in my life or superficial opinion with little substance. I doubt I will continue to update this blog, my internet usage is limited (by choice) and when i am on the internet i am typically using it for work or university purposes.

Thank you Michael, Nathan, Max and Mitchell for a great unit.

Here is the not so long awaited link to my project B – datavisualisation:

http://roadfactsaus.synthasite.com/

I used google docs and excel to currate my information. Most of my information on car pricing was gathered from ‘Topgear’ magazine’s cars guide. I used the AIP website for information about petrol and ‘The Age’ for statistics about cars sales.

I think it could be a little bit better if i had’ve been able to organise the cars list in a better way, but after typing and calculating those figures there was no way i was ever going to leave it out. I have made all my spreadsheets public on Google docs for anyone interested.

I think the biggest trend i uncovered was that car usage has not susided, people are still buying cars even though the price of petrol and indeed living has risen. Another thing i found was that even though Holden has brought in it’s 99c fuel cap, their cars remain a little more expensive, and a little more expensive to run. There was also the facts supporting the big three names having a stranglehold on the Australain car market (Toyota, Holden & Ford). I am quite happy with the finished product overall.

For my second major assignment I’ve chosen to ditch my original datavisualisation idea (still sticking with that option however.) and switch from using Lastfm and present something which will perhaps be less interesting but have more figures. It might even be slightly useful.  My project will hopefully have a large number of details on the current car range avaliable to Australians with out consideration of budget. I’m using the ‘new cars guide’ featured at the back of Topgear magazines.

I’m going to be looking at (RRP) prices, safety ratings, fuel consumptions and basically any fact i can possibly squeeze out of my magazine.  I’m thinking of drawing on the Australian Bureau of Statistics if there is anything relevant avaliable.

My last consideration will be how to host it, something to think about tomorrow. I’ll link it here if possible.

Looking at graphs gets some people excited, wierd i know but for regular folk it can get more than a little boring. I’m not enitrely sure when these the idea of datavisualisation came about but it is a good practice in making data more entertaining. Jonathan Farris, co-creator of ‘wefeelfine’ amoungst other projects, said the key is to finding the story in your data and presenting it to the viewer. He also found by making his projects somewhat human, this too added to the appeal. One problem i found with his creation ‘wefeelfine’ is i couldn’t actually get it to start up, I’m not exactly sure why. Lets not place blame.

This is the link to the page, it is worth checking out if you can get it to work.

http://www.wefeelfine.org/

In my study for the upcoming end-of-year exams i came across what i considered to be a cool and quite interesting idea.  Anyone familiar with web design and networked media will have some understanding of taxonomy (ordering things into categories or hierachies) or folksonomies (socially tagged or categorised information). These two forms of classification are created by tagging information with metadata (which is simply infromation about information), the idea of a semantic web is that enough of a folksonomy of metadata will be established to create a more efficient and almost intelligent internet service. Much like Tivo, but for your web browsing, sort of. Semantics being the study of meaning for anyone unsure about the concept.

Chicago based punk-rockers Rise Against released their lastest offering earlier last week, ‘Appeal to Reason”. The album is the groups fifth album and is in the mould of “The Sufferer and the Witness”, their last album released in 2006. Being from the punk genre, the album features some highly emotive vocals and riffs and as modern music goes it is quite raw. There are few effects, which means good things for anyone thinking of seeing them live when they take thier album on the road. One criticizm i have however is that the band inculded a “meats mot green” sticker pro-vegetarian (as the band members are vegans as far as i know) from the PETA group. I personally think this is going a little too far, I’m a supporter of the frredom to make ones own decisions. Nobody is forcing you to use or keep the sticker though.

Comparing this album to what i’ve been listening to previously it is really quite raw. NIN (Nine Inch Nails) offerings of “the Slip”, “With Teeth” and “the Fragile” all feature high usage of synth, this is very typical of the Industrial rock scene which was pioneered by NIN (in my opinion). Although there is some highly emotive vocal offerings from frontman Trent Reznor, they aren’t backed up by thse equally emotive riffs. This is due to the characteristics of the genre, sounds made by machines. They are both good, but worlds apart in terms of their sound, which is strange considering they both are sub-genres of rock.

Sadly, amongst the Canberra populous there is a culture of accepting sub-par night time ‘activities’. Sure if you’re feeling a little tired and need to relax watch the telly and recover, but I refuse to accept that TV and DVDs are all there is to do. Of course there is always the city nightlife, if you’re young and hip but in winter Canberra can be brutally cold. Last weekend my girlfriend and I had to resort to cleaning our cars at a 24-hour car wash to keep us entertained. At least we both got clean cars out of it.

This was the long weekend, which brings me to my next point, the expectations of a public holiday. Being a university student there is usually always some work that could be done, but I feel that Public holidays should be kept free of such expectations. Not that I don’t mind studying on a Monday afternoon, but if everybody else is enjoying labour day then why can’t I?

Every once in a while there comes a day where stress disappears and the ever increasing work load is stemmed, a catch up day of sorts. These days are refered in the public forum as public holidays. Monday will see one of these great days come to pass, and i can’t wait… Even if i don’t get anything done i don’t care, the whole idea of the day is to be care free.

In other exciting news with the announcement of the line of of rock music festival Soundwave sees industrial/alternative rock veterans Nine Inch Nails headlining. More details on the bands are available on the 2009 website listed below.

http://www.soundwavefestival.com/artists/

As you may or may not have been aware, metal-band Disturbed achieved a number one record in Australia earlier this year with their fourth creation – Indestructible. Due to their growing popularity they headlined are currently headlining a tour featuring (for the Australian leg at least) P.O.D. who are releasing their new album on September 20 (entitled When Angels & Serpents Dance), Alter bridge and Behind Crimson Eyes, a band from Melbourne.

The Sydney gig was held on Wednesday the third of September and was held at Horden Pavilion. I was lucky enough to attend along with some mates, and (apparently) a sell out crowd. The queue to get in was a good 500 meters long, and by the time we had made it in and made a few purchases from the merchandise stall Behind Crimson Eyes had finished. For some reason they only played for fifteen minutes (not that I’m complaining).

Alter Bridge, which according to what I’m told, is the band Creed without their old singer, played next and met a mixed response. They weren’t heavy enough for some, but i still found them to be quite entertaining. They perhaps suffered because of the slower pace in some of their songs, this didn’t appeal to an audience out for a night of loud and fast metal.

P.O.D. (Payable On Death) were next to the stage, and also met a mixed response due to their banner which had a depiction of Jesus Christ. In my personal opinion they were really good, by this stage i was only a few short meters from the stage itself, right where the action is. They played several of their bigger songs such as “Boom”, “Youth of the Nation” and “Southtown”, and even threw in a punk-rock song of which i hadn’t heard before. it was a good ploy as the fast beat had the crowd reeling. They managed to get the crowd involved in “Youth of the Nation” which also went down well. P.O.D. played for what must have been close to an hour.

At approximately 9:48 David Draiman (Frontman for the band) was wheeled out on what resembled a  wooden L-trolley wearing a straight-jacket and a muzzle (like that of Hannibal). The band kicked off with a track from their latest album entitled “Perfect Insanity”. The band played songs from all of their four albums much to the crowds’ (and my) delight. The concert featured a couple of short speeches from David Draiman regarding the band and their music, the crowd didn’t seem to care too much and cheered at everything he said regardless. The performance was filmed and I have my suspicions that a tour edition CD/DVD may be in the works. As everyone could have predicted the encore was brought to a close by the song that put Disturbed on the map, “The Sickness” and the reaction from the crowd (which had been MASSIVE when appealing for an encore) was enormous  – then again there must have been close to 10,000 people there.

This experience made me wish i lived in Sydney…

I’ve decided (like most) to create an online exhibition using one of my sets from flickr… I am choosing to show my “underpass” set which features a legal graffiti site which is in a constant state of flux. I am still working on it but i will link it when it is published.