SO, moving on. Lets make a book a blog.
My two primary features of a blog were that it a) has allows the user to interact and customise and b) that a blog is transitory, temporary and constantly changing and updating.
So, for a book, video or audio to be more blog-like, it might possess these features:
allows users to customise – visual aesthetics, colours, volume, length, direction (in a more superficial sense) content, meaning, relevance, distribution (on a more involved level)
allows the ‘reader’ to contribute and collaborate (ideally add their own content to text, video or audio, manipulate and remix it as they would like)
allows the ‘reader’ to come back at any time and find that the content had changed or been updated, and that this has been done by an unlimited number of authors.
any ‘page’ can be read in any order. The content is completely non-linear, and can therefore be read any which way, with hyperlinks offering anchors between points.
any one screen or page might contain an array of video, audio and text, all of which again offer their own links and directions to other information.
is portable, accessible from any location (or any pc, at least, so globally, let’s say)
goes on and on and on until the end of time (albeit constantly changing), in some format or another, travelling through the series of tubes known as the interweb to an unforseen destination….
Keshanee also mentioned the fact that books (as blogs) would be searchable, you would be able to search through all content for what you are after, which is a fantastic point I hadn’t thought of – the interactivity should let us control where we go and what we want to see….
This is just a few, among many many qualities of a blog you could argue could be applied to the mediums of books, video and audio. Hopefully all my indulgence in blogs will lead me to more.
BUT having said all that, I might also make my blog slightly more book like, in that it can be marked… technology such as this already exists (and is great fun) in ‘whiteboard’ websites such as skrbl, an online collaboration tool.
Maybe? I don’t know. As far as I am concerned, the more involved the better. bring on the remix.
I have a relatively rudimentary understanding of this, but here is a bit more info.
When analogue is converted to digital audio, it is done in many many little chunks. These are called ‘samples‘ and they are collected at a particular sampling rate that dictates how many samples are taken from a continuous signal (or sound) to create a discrete signal. A discrete signal is a sound made up of numerous samples of the original.
Different sampling rates are more suited to different sounds, but the higher the sampling rate and bit resolution, the more fidelity (the quality and the accuracy) of the recording.
In music, sampling is the act of taking a portion, or sample, of one sound recording and reusing it as an instrument or element of a new recording. This is typically done with a sampler, which can be a piece of hardware or a computer program on a digital computer. Sampling is also possible with tape loops or with vinyl records on a phonograph.
Musical sampling has become popular through its use in a wide variety of modern music, primarily hip hop, and has also provided a foundation for the development of new music styles, particularly electronica. The use of samples also outlines important copyright ssues, as artist incorporate (copy?) more and more snippets of other recordings into their own compositions. A bit more on that here. It again brings up the question of promoting a read/write or remix culture vs a read only culture.
Although not exactly a ‘composition’, this weeks exercise in sampling demonstrated a method of sample (albeit at a very slow rate). Perhaps not ready to be looped into some epic hip hop masterpiece just yet, but just an example of what can be done (with a digital dictaphone, no less) and how sampled sounds can be used.
I have been using flash as the codec for my latest video installations on my blog. This was because the plugin I was using (podpress) was struggling to display the MP4 files for some reason. I am really anal about these things and it was giving me the sh*ts.
Our discussion in class alerted me to fact that flash was by no means an ideal codec – the primary problem I would have with it is that it restricts the playing of your media file to a limited amount of media players (even though I think it looks very nice).
Never to fear, I am now aware of two new players, embed quicktime (or is it quicktime embed??) and Vpip, both of which I will have installed asap, allowing me to hopefully publish videos with greater ease and in the preferred format. Great news for all.
