We had joy, we had fun, we had seasons in the sun.
..and now Networked Media Production has come to an end. It’s been a really interesting unit, and while a lot of the concepts that we covered weren’t knew to me, I guess I never really sat down and thought about them to the extent that I have since our first lecture. Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is something that still haunts, confuses and frightens me, but I have a much better understanding of how it works and what a powerful tool it is! ( a brief visit to my Web Production and Design site will show the trials and tribulations I have gone through with the great beast CSS).
We discussed blogs, and as evidenced by this very post, created our own blogs as a way to reflect and analyse on the things that we have picked up along the way. For the most this Blog still feels a little confused, as my audience at this point is my tutors and fellow students, people who I assume have the same level of understanding and implementation as myself (if not better in some cases).
While I now find that a blogging service like Wordpress would have been a much better choice when it came to being able to record my Blog’s traffic and popularity, Tumblr have implemented a new feature called “Tumblarity”. This feature is nowhere as comprehensive as Wordpress’ amazing recording, but it does let me know a few things about my Blog.
- My Blog is not in the top 50,000 Tumblr Blogs.
- I have a Tumblarity of 3 which is unchanged since yesterday.
- I have a total of five followers (and one of those five is me - sigh)
None of this is particularly Earth shattering, and it would have been much nicer in retrospect to be able to track which posts were more popular, have an ability to leave comments (Stupid Tumblr). So, while I’m not about to win any popularity contents, I do hope that the content I have posted at least entertained you four people that have taken the time to read it :) 
I found the ideas of Remix’s and Mashups quite amazing, especially the Mashup of George Bush singing U2’s “Sunday Bloody Sunday” As I posted in an earlier Blog I was also entertained (and somewhat confused) by “The Interactive Playground of Paul Neave” which is well worth checking out and a great example of using an application programming interface (or API) to bring together some great media into something unique!
While API’s, Mashups and Remixes have a great use for more mundane things like Restaurant locations on Google Maps etc, I can see that as far as an entertainment point of view the possibilities and limitless! I have enjoyed maintaining this Blog, I can see that in the future maintenance of my blogs Id like to add much more content in the way of videos, sound and images as well as a level of Web 2.0 as far as having a comments section, and this will probably be done through another service like Wordpress.
I have chosen three posts that I hope you can take the time to go and read, and perhaps think about following me after the unit ends.
I started this blog with a quote from Back to the Future, so it only seems fitting that I close with one as well.
“The Future is whatever you make it - so make it a good one!”
Peace!
