Among the Audience

The era of mass media is giving way to one of personal and participatory media, says Andreas Kluth. That will profoundly change both the media industry and society as a whole.

The Economist (online) Apr 20th 2006 | from the print edition

http://www.economist.com/node/6794156

Kluth writes that the start of mass media arrived when Gutenberg invented movable letters to print the books that were previously written by monks and only accessible to the aristocratic and religious elite. Now, the written word could be circulated widely.

The next technological breakthrough was radio and then television.

Then came computers and the world wide web which dramatically changed the flow of information: the audience is no longer a passive media consumer but participates in creating media and information. In the latest media revolution, "the boundaries between audiences and creators become blurred and often invisible." Dictionary publisher Merriam-Webster chose 'blog' as its word of the year in 2004, and the New Oxford American Dictionary picked 'podcast' in 2005. 

'Media Mogul' Barry Diller, who had launched America's FOX Broadcasting, did not believe in 2006 that participatory media, or what is labelled social media today, could ever become the basis of a media industry, mainly because of average quality and talent.

Of course Diller has been proven wrong. As Joe Kraus, founder of JotSpot which makes software for wikis, says, “the old media model was: there is one source of truth. The new media model is: there are multiple sources of truth, and we will sort it out.”

Participatory media has opened the curtain for an explosion of talent and diversity, and people can decide for themselves what they like and follow.

Update

The End of Year Unofficial website does have a name now, and we seem to get somewhere. All the teams have been busy with their parts, uploading images and videos, creating the banner template and writing. Last week we got some images and materials from previous semesters and exhibitions and in the meantime we also got a Welcome address. Tom has now finished slicing and linking up the menu items and we now have to go throught the content we put up to finalise design and layout. For example over the weekend I found that the link to last years ABC exhibition report did not work, so made up page just for exercise to practice linking and uploading images. Anyway, Tom fixed this today. So just finalising and putting up the Welcome address today. And checking what everybody else did exactly.

Group Work

The final task is to create an unofficial website for the end of year activities of the students of Design, Visual Arts, Interactive Digital Media and New Media, Contemporary Music and Architecture.

We split up in several group. Our group is doing the Welcome page which includes info on the various courses, welcome addresses, time table of activities and sourcing and uploading of exhibition footage and works from previous years.

As usual, everything is last minute and there is no final time table yet. We contacted the relevant lecturers for a few sentences to include on the site, but have not had much success. But we got documentary materials from previous years and uploaded that and any other information we could source from the official website.

So it will be a really basic site.

Dreamweaver

Adobe Dreamweaver is a popular web design software that provides an intuitive visual interface for making and editing HTML websites.

We only had a brief look into Dreamweaver: created a site, created a template, created a page based on this template, created a table with menu links, added an image and background colour and editable regions.

We created a template for our pages which included a table with menu links. Templates can be applied to pages by Modify>Templates>Apply Template to Page.

So this is the very purple Website with the menu links to five pages.

Very clear and short introduction, part of Adobe webinar - 5:32 min
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=zQXUGGZFvhA

This is a full episode of a Adobe Dreamweaver intro webinar
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iSoqmghBtB8&h=505&w=640 

Set up Dreamweaver site, link local folders, create folders within Dreamweaver - 9:08 min and follow up lessons, easy to understand
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Ubkr5EIBA4&feature=related

How to link pages
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XehcMEGNk3g

Set up site and link local folders, create and pages, use templates, insert and optimise images (banner),  -22 min, detailed
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9LXcbt502m0

Digicraft created a series of videos Building a Webpage from Start to Finish. The series starts with designing a page using Photoshop, setting up and connecting a website, html coding and more. It is long but very in-depth and therefore easy to understand and follow. The link above to the intro on youtube provides a link from where lessons can be downloaded as PDFs and where assets for exercises are stored. Absolutely great! But takes a Sunday afternoon.
And this is the link to the first DigiCraft video
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xUjHtm3vcw8&feature=relmfu

Here the Adobe tutorial articles
http://www.adobe.com/devnet/dreamweaver/articles/first_website_pt1.html

And this site probably has answers to just about everything Dreamweaver
http://www.youtube.com/user/DreamWeaverTutorial

Cyberduck

Cyber Duck is a free FTP (File Transfer Protocol) program (also called an FTP client) that allows you to upload, download and change permissions of files you keep in the webspace.

It's fast to download the Cyber Duck program but you need to have arranged for space on a server that will host the files uploaded with Cyber Duck. Once server details and password are set up, it is just a matter of dragging or importing the folder containing the html and related files. It is very important to not disturb or change the file structure.

FTP and Cyber Duck is also excellent for sharing large files, like videos, which take ages to up and download with Dropbox for example. 

First basic site I uploaded via Cyber Duck

Here are some good websites explaining Cyber Duck:

Cyber Duck complete instructions

USE FTP with Cyber Duck - video

HTML basics - boot camp alright

HTML stands for Hypertext Markup Language, and as it is the language or "code" to build/write webpages.

And then there are programs or WYSIWYG editors (What You See Is What You Get), which provide a user friendly graphical user interface (GUI) for web authoring. The user does not need to have comprehensive knowledge of HTML coding as HTML editors encode the information into the correct format. One prominent web authoring program is Adobe's Dreamweaver.

So there are a few rules for creating html files:

filename must be in lower case

no special characters in filename

extension is .html

text needs to be in plain text without any formatting, any text editor can be used.

The basics of the html language or code are quite simple:

the graphical representation of text and objects - content - on the web is determined by tags, usually a pair of tags, the "start tag" and "end tag". The tags are enclosed in <brackets>. For example <b>web</b> will create the word web in bold typeface.

Similarly, other formatting also needs to be done through tagging:

<head></head>

<title></title>

<body></body>

<header1></header1>

etc.

Below is what the code or instructions would look like to create a table with 1 row and five columns containing the text: Home, Information, Tutorials, Images, Videos.

The code for linking to another webpage is

<a href=http://www.webaddress>Click here to go to webaddress</a>

Upload images

Images can be uploaded from their source, the images folder needs to be in the same directory as the webpages. Attributes like width, height, border and explanatory text can be included.

<img src="images/webphoto.jpg" width="60" height="80" border="0" alt="Image from Illustrator"/>

Here is an excellent site with all the codes explained, including examples and explanations, and there are also tutorials. Highly recommended!

http://www.web-source.net/html_codes_chart.htm

And here is a hexagonal colour chart

http://www.visibone.com/color/hexagon_800.gif

Sibelius tune after Reason treatment

After dragging the simple "Music over Chords" tune we created a few weeks ago through Reason, it is now all bells, thimbles and bubbles. Nothing like the original. Watch out - these thimbles are really high pitch.




I also now figured out how to get mp3 files onto the blog - they need to be saved somewhere else on the web as Blogger does not store audio files. I set up a sites.google.com website and uploaded audio there. I also found a good instruction and code to embed and audio player on the blog:

http://elearncal.wordpress.com/2011/03/22/how-to-embed-mp3-files-in-blogger/

and there is a link to a text file from where the code can be copied and adjusted.