Week 02 
Some Style Please...
Firstly, in this weeks lecture we were asked to start adding some style to our weekly entries via CSS. So here is my weekly blog with CSS included...
Weekly Labs
This week we had our first supervised weekly lab session. We each got assigned our lecturer who would be supervising our major projects. I got assigned to Nicklas and I met with him for 5 minutes or so to discuss the ideas I had come up with. Nicklas raised some very good points on each idea and right now I am still undecided as to which project idea I should undertake. Basically it boils down to weather I want to go for a risky project or a not so risky project.
The Three Ideas
We both agreed that my interactive tour of Dublin idea has been done probably hundreds of times over already, to make this a good project idea I would have to come up with a fresh new take on it. I did a quick search on the internet and found lots of sites all with different ways of giving an interactive tour of Dublin. Below are a few of these sites:
DublinVR.net
The first site DublinVR.net mainly just gives a long list of 360° photographs of points of interest in Dublin. The user can click on the photograph and drag their mouse to spin it from left to right. The photographs are quite good and there are plenty of them but there isn't really much else to the site, as far as I can see the photographs aren't updated at all and the information that goes with each photograph is mostly taken from wikipedia. The navigation of the site is pretty easy but there is only one small text link to the list of photographs on the home page, so it could be hard to find. If I was to choose the interactive Dublin tour as my project this idea could only be a very small part of the site as there really isn't that much work involved in this.
Dublinks.com
The second site is DubLinks.com This is great site that pulls together all sorts of information for locals and tourists alike. It has lots of great sections including things like competitions and an events calendar. The navigation is organised by "Dublin by day" and "Dublin by night" making it very easy to find what you are looking for. This site really has it all covered. A complete new take on tourist information would have to be created to compete with this site otherwise I would just be replicating the data found here.
Dublincity.ie
Lastly I had a look at DublinCity.ie. This web site is run by Dublin City Council and is more about council related information but it does have a fantastic interactive map, which I have shown in the screen shot above. On the left of the screen is a complete map of Dublin City Centre, the user can click on any of the squares on this map and a more detailed version of this square is displayed on the right. Icons below the map can also be click on to show different items such as points of interest and car parks. It even includes some 360° photographs like in the first web site I reviewed. The map is displayed using simple JavaScript but a lot of effort has gone into the drawing of the map as there is a great amount of detail included.
I think that even after looking at just these three web sites it is clear that the area of tourist information surrounding Dublin has been well covered. Going with this idea as my major project would be replicating data found on other web sites. It would take a really great idea to make it special and stand out from the rest. I'm not going to rule out this idea just yet, if I can come up with a good enough idea it could work well but for now it doesn't look likely.
To Risk Or Not To Risk
Which brings me down to my two other ideas, Irish for beginners and extreme action photography. Nicklas thought that the Irish for beginners site was a fairly safe bet, with a lot of work put in it could be a really good project, but the extreme action photography web site could be risky. First of all the idea behind the site could be carried out very easily, basically create a group on Flickr and use it to display some photos. Obviously this is no where near enough work for my major project as it would take about half an hour to do, so this site needs something more. Its needs something cool to go with it so that a good online community could be built. Nicklas suggested users being able to upload pictures and videos direct from their mobile phones and also things like weekly prizes to the best pictures / videos. This and a few other ideas and it could be a really good major project but the whole thing will be based on having a good online community to back it. Without a large number of users this site will have nothing. I would need to have the base of the site online by January time and then put a lot of time into advertising the site to get the users to go with it. It is a lot of work and it is possible but I need to decide if it is worth the risk or not. In 7 or 8 months time if the site has hardly any users it will all have been pointless. What would the like of Bebo or MySpace be like without their large number of users? They probably wouldn't be online anymore. Below are a few web sites I have found on this topic. Again, here we have 3 sites. Each has their differences but in essence they are all doing the same thing, each one is an online photographer community. Each of these sites have a lot of users registered and the thing that worries me is the fact that these sites have a very broad range of types of photographs that users can display, pretty much anything, whereas my idea is a very specific type of photography. Trying to get a good number of users for something as specific as this would be very hard; possible, but extremely hard.
Photopoints.com
The first site I have looked at is PhotoPoints.com. One of the screen shots is of their photo of the month contest. Nicklas suggested this idea to me for my idea but on a weekly basis instead of monthly. This definitely is a good idea as it gives users an incentive to submit their photos and as you can see here there has been a lot of photos submitted. This site definitely has a lot of content; you can do the obvious things like submit photos, create greeting cards, etc but you can also search for registered users, view discussion forums on photography or have a favourite photo queue. I think it takes this amount of content to keep users coming back; the content also has to be of good quality, if features don't work properly or are pointless users will become frustrated and give up on the site.
Shutterbugs.info
The second site I looked at was ShutterBugs.info. This is another online photography community, similar to the rest of them. One thing that stands out though is the online photography course. This could be used as a good feature to attract users, get them to sign up to the site and submit the photos they have taken after taking the photography course. Possibly even photos they have taken before they took the photography course and photos they took after to show other users the improvements in their skills. One very annoying feature of this site is having to register to use any of the features; users can't just browse the courses they have to register before they can see what they are even registering for. A sample course or something similar would be a good idea even just to encourage the user to sign-up.
Eyefetch.com
Finally I had a look at EyeFetch.com. One thing that caught my eye on this site was the user statistics they have. They have nearly 15,000 registered users and nearly half a million photographs online. These figures interested me. Is this what it takes to have a good online community? Is such a thing possible with a specific group as extreme action photography? There is a lot going on in this site; it's probably aimed more towards the discussion of photography, which is probably why there are some many users.
Even after this little amount of research I can see that there are already a lot of different online communities around, even just for photography. I can see that it would be very hard to make such a site successful and I definitely need to think long and hard before undertaking such a project.
...Not To Risk
Which finally brings me to my last idea, Irish for beginners. As has been previously stated this idea would be a fairly safe bet, it doesn't rely on anything else happening for it to work. The outcome of this project will purely depend on the amount of work I put into it; which, as I have learned by looking at other final year projects, is A LOT! As I had said when I initially put this idea down in writing, it would be aimed at kids who don't know much Irish rather than older people who may know a lot of Irish. This is mainly because my grasp of the Irish language is very limited, i.e. it is non-existent! Even though I do not know any Irish I do know people who are fluent in the language, it has been discussed with these people and agreed that they would help me out with voice over's etc when the time comes.
Nicklas pointed out that this site could not be aimed at say 5 - 10 year olds as their ability would each be very different. It would be better to aim it at a more specific age group; probably 5 and 6 year olds, i.e. kids just starting school who do not know any Irish, like myself. Seeing as this project would be aimed at such a young age group Nicklas suggested that it would be a good idea to create 2 or 3 characters to take the kids through the tutorials. Some different characters would probably need to be created by early January and shown to kids to see which ones they like best. I think this would be a very good starting point, which leads me to my research. I looked at many different sites this week in relation to Irish, language tutorials and just tutorials in general. Sometimes it can be hard to find tutorials on the internet as a lot of web sites require you to buy the tutorials on CD / DVD, I think I am going to have to spend some time and try to get my hands on a few tutorials like this to further my research. Below are a few interesting things I found:
Irishlanguage.net
The first site I had a look at was IrishLanguage.net. This web site has a lot of very good information. I found a few interesting facts about the language; some I knew (like very few people use it as their first language) and some I didn't know (like it is spoken in some small communities in Canada and Argentina).
One very interesting point I found was to do with the different Irish dialects. I knew there are a few different Irish dialects and each has some variations but I didn't know the extend that these variations go to. Here is a small extract from the web site:
"The differences between dialects are considerable, and have led to recurrent difficulties in defining standard Irish. Even everyday phrases can show startling dialectal variation: the standard example is "How are you?": Ulster: cad é mar atá tú? ("what is it as you are?" Note: caidé or goidé are alternative renderings of cad é) Connacht: cén chaoi a bhfuil tú? ("what way [is it] that you are?") Munster: conas taoí? ("how are you?")
In recent times, however, contacts between speakers of different dialects have become more common, and mixed dialects have originated. Nevertheless, many dialect speakers (especially Ulster) are still jealously trying to guard their own variety against influences from other dialects. Among non-native speakers, this can be seen as a quest for authenticity. Regional accents are commonly taught to non-natives and imitated: an urban non-native speaker of Irish in Cork City (Cathair Chorcaí) is very probably trying to emulate Coolea or Kerry dialect; one from Belfast (Béal Feirste) tends to speak an Irish modelled on the Rosses dialect of Donegal; and Galwegian Irish-speakers, living next door to Connemara, will do their best to sound like a Connemara native.
There also exists a cant called Shelta, based partly on English and partly Irish, in use by the Irish Travellers." (IrishLanguage.net 2007)
This has produced a problem that will require more research. If this is the project that I am going to pursue I will need to decided which dialect I am going to use or find out whichever one is the standard dialect and use it. Also the fact that there are differences in dialects will have to be stated somewhere in the tutorials, weather it be stated at the start or the end I am as yet unsure.
Summerlands.com
The second site I looked at was summerlands.com and in particular their Learning Irish page. As you can see from the screen shot they have a hugh list of weekly tutorials. The tutorials are mainly text based with not much interaction at all. This definitely would not be the kind of tutorials I would be creating as kids wouldn't be able to understand any of it (I can hardly understand it never mind kids). There is, however, some useful information on this site regarding the language side of things that I may be able to use; as for inspiration though, it's giving me none!
Playkidsgames.com
Finally I looked at PlayKidsGames.com. This is a web site for kids to go and play "educational" games. It isn't Irish related but it is related to online learning for kids and has shown me the different types of games that kids would be able to play. For example a whack-a-mole games where the user has to whack moles holding different letters in order of the alphabet. Games like this could be very easily used to aid the learning process.
References
irishlanguage.net. (2007). Irish Dialects. Available: http://www.irishlanguage.net/irish/dialects.asp. Last accessed 10 October 2007.
And Finally... Harvard Referencing
As an additional part to this weeks homework we were asked to do some research on Harvard Referencing and add what we had found to our blogs. As a multimedia student referencing is something that I haven't had to deal with much before, especially Harvard Referencing (I didn't even know it existed). In that respect I supposed it is a very good idea to research this now, with our final projects around the corner it's definitely very relevant. I've had a look around the internet and there are literally thousands of pages on Harvard Referencing, so I'm going to have to pick out the best bits of information to make it easiest to understand, for myself mostly.
Firstly citation. Wikipedia states that:
"A citation or bibliographic citation is a reference to a book, article, web page, or other published item with sufficient detail to identify the item uniquely." (Wikipedia 2007)
So citation is uniquely identifying someone else's work that you have used within your own work, weather it be a book, journal or even a web site. Basically it is giving credit to the author of a piece of work you are using instead of taking credit for yourself, taking credit for it yourself would be plagiarism. The Union County College Library has put it very simply:
"Citation: The information needed to identify and find an information source." (Union County College Library)
Onto Harvard Referencing. Wikipedia states that:
"Harvard referencing, also known as the author-date system, or parenthetical system, is a citation system developed by Harvard University and used by many publishers internationally." (Wikipedia 2007)
Basically Harvard referencing is a style of referencing used by a lot of people and is pretty much the standard way to go. There are a few other different types of referencing but a lot of people use the Harvard style. Wikipedia goes on to state that the Harvard style of referencing was created by Edward Laurens Mark, a professor of Anatomy and the director of the zoological laboratory at Harvard University. Apparently he may of got the idea from a cataloguing system used by Harvard's Museum of Comparative Zoology library. Its first known usage was in 1881 when Edward Mark used it in a paper on the embryogenesis of the garden slug.
The Leeds University Library has said:
"The Harvard style is the most commonly-used style of referencing worldwide. Unfortunately, it is not 'owned' by any institution or organisation, so no authority sets the rules. This means they have been interpreted slightly differently by different institutions." (Leeds University Library Information Literacy Team 2007)
The Harvard style of referencing is not owned by anyone so how it is used can vary slightly but the most common way of citing used this style is as follows:
"A book is cited in the text in parentheses, after the section, sentence, or paragraph for which the book was used as a source, using the surname of the author and the year of publication only, with the parentheses closing before the period, as in (Author 2005). A complete citation is then placed at the end of the text in an alphabetized list of References" (Wikipedia 2007).
So to put it simply after a source is used put in brackets the author and year of publication, like so (Jonathan Gribben 2007). And then at the end of the text a complete list of sources used needs to be created. This list needs to be in alphabetical order and in a certain format. For a book this format would be: AuthorSurname, AuthorFirstName. (Year of Publication). BookTitle, PlaceOfPublication: Publisher. ISBN Number. Or for an article the format would be: AuthorSurname, AuthorFirstName. "ArticleTitle", Where Article Was Published, DateofPublication. And finally the format for a web site would be: Author. (Year of Publication). Article Title. Available: Full URL. Date You Last Visited.
Finally I came across this great web site: Neil's Toolbox. On this web site you can find a Harvard reference generator where you can put in the details of a source and it will generate the reference for you in the correct format.
References
Leeds University Library Information Literacy Team. (2007). Harvard style bibliographies and references. Available: http://www.leeds.ac.uk/library/training/referencing/harvard.htm. Last accessed 10 October 2007.
Union County College Library. Glossary. Available: http://faculty.ucc.edu/library/glossary.htm. Last accessed 10 October 2007.
Wikipedia. (2007). Citation. Available: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citation. Last accessed 10 October 2007.
Wikipedia. (2007). Harvard referencing. Available: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Harvard_referencing. Last accessed 10 October 2007.
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Jonathan is an enthusiastic web designer with a great passion for all things technical, extreme sports, photography and the church he attends. After spending almost 18 months in Dublin Jonathan has returned with his sights set on making his mark in the multimedia industry.
