week 11

Nearing the end of the semester brings about 2 things the cold and assignments. The last assignment for this semester is a data visualization concept. I still don’t have a idea but this week in our tutorials I was able to look at a few cool ideas. Michael had put a lot of links on delicious to look at. Towards the end of the tutorial everyone in the class had to analyze and present a data visualization to the class. I had a Crayola data visualization time line. It showed how the Crayola colours had increased as the years went on up to the present. In 1901 there were only 8 colours and by 2010 there are 120. the graph shows that the colours increase on average 2.56% a year. It also shows that the colours double every 28 years. If this trend keeps going then my kids will have 330 crayons to draw with in the year 2050. Hopefully I come up with a sweet idea soon.

week 10

This week in the tutorial I had to take part in an exercise that made us get Into small groups, come up with an idea for a web site or online service that makes use of our collective intelligence. Decision markets, collaborative filtering, voting, you name it. Explain how using collective intelligence/the wisdom of crowds is different to, or better than, doing it in a centralised, controlled fashion. What problems might come up with building the service? What our group came up in the 45min that we had was an application for a smart phone or ipod. This application would act like a portable suggestion device. It would work like Amazon in that it would suggest items on what you have already purchased. This app would make shopping easier and more efficient. It would also be able to show you where things were that were of interest using geo tagged items. Each of the geo tagged items would have a picture of the item and the variables in stock with prices and suggest things that would go well with the item. It would also share information with your bank account so it would suggest items within your price range. The app would be completely free as it uses advertisements during suggestions. It would also have a memory of the average time that you eat so during that time adds for food companies would pop up.

Week 9

This week we started discussing web 2.0. What I took out of the lecture is that web 2.0 is almost a computer brain. It uses a thing called ajax. This system does a number of things. For example if u were to buy a book off amazon it remembers what u bought and suggest other titles that u might like. This is done by looking at people who have also purchased the same book and what they have gone on to buy. It also searches the same genre of book as well. The ajax system also makes it possible to be on the same page and not have to confirm and upload another web page every time you put a piece of information into it. I was also told of the long tail. It explains that when a thing on the web is popular generally it will follow the long tail graph. That is that at graph resembles an exponential graph a large increase at the start and a dragged out tail hence the name the long tail. But the greatest thing that i learnt that lecture was google trends it solves so many arguments its the greatest.