I'm moving, this place smells

I'm out of here blogger.com sucks, I need to find a new home for my blog, bye bye!

How I feel about blogging now

After nearly 4 months, (with a rather large gap in between) I have decided that blogging is a wonderful way to vent frustration and anger at the world and also a good way to remember things I have learned. The problem I have found with this blog is its complexity to add new posts, I would probably have added more posts if I could simply press one button on my desktop to launch a notepad and then another to publish the blog, passwords and usernames suck! end of rant.

Top Gear is officially the best thing on T.V

I have just witnessed a Reliant Robin, being transformed into a space shuttle and launched into space, what a programme!

Time and space

Getting deep now!

Time and space no longer exist, you see the internet has gone and buggered all of those rules right up, open all day and all night with no geographical boundaries or limitations.

Does this have anything to do with why I am sat in Weymouth House at 2am doing my IMS assignment, maybe it does. We now live in a 24 hr culture, where you can access information at any time of the day or night, in the ye olden days Libraries used to close at a reasonable hour, now Uni libraries are open until 12 and study rooms are open all night, which means that students live like Nosferatu, choosing to sleep, go on facebook and generally mince during the day, panic at about 3pm that they have done no work and then spend thier evenings, nights and early hours of the morning doing work.

Assignment conundrums

less than a week to go and I have just changed my IMS assignment title for the 11th time, I think I may be in the shit! This one i'm going to bloody well stick with if it kills me.

I'm Back!

Never before has a name been so apt for a Blog, its been a while, this is due to several factors:

1.Laziness

2.I'm in my third year so when I'm not being lazy i'm working my ass off to catch up

3.I still believe that this blogging thing may possibly be a waste of time.


So what am I doing back here? Well i'm in search of inspirado, I'm still searching for a topic for my IMS assignment and I felt that if I immersed myself in interactive media, then something might pop up......................So far nothing. I'll get back when an idea presents itself.

Laters Ed

You Tube How does it generate cash?

YouTube was sold to Google for $1.6Bn, and has yet to make a profit, am I the only one who sees a problem with this.

The boys and girls at Google are a very clever bunch and I have no doubt that they do have a money making scheme lined up for YouTube, but its taking a bit of a while dont you think?

For my IMS assignemment I have decided to have a stab at rectifying this problem and working out ways of generating some cash with YouTube without screwing over its users.

Got a bit of an issue working out what academic theories to apply to my idea though.

The plan is simple.

YouTube weekly podcasts, containing an hour of the weeks best clips as rated by YouTube users. That way users can watch YouTube content on the move, without an internet connection and the company can make money by selling ad space on the podcast, either in the form of total sponsorship or ads in between clips.

Trouble is its sort of a backwards step, although the content would be democratically voted for by the users, it would not necessarilly be the content some users want to veiw, which kind of takes us back to old style broadcasting, (sort of) Agggraaahhhh! maybe this idea sucks, I'll stick my head in a few journals and get back to you. TTFN

Global Warming eh?

Winter came late this year, however when it finally did arrive I thought that it would wipe the smug grins off many of the doommongers lips.

The doommongers didnt shut up though, instead of banging on about global warming, they shifted to moan about the snow and how treacherous it was and how inconvienent it was, and how the country would be brought to a flaming standstill.

Why is it that we like to be so damn negative in this country, the weathermen are never happy unless its raining, not proper rain of course, but drizzly rain, boring drizzly rain, weather that is not too hot, not too cold but just right. Yawn!

Well screw you weathermen, cos this weekend I went snowboarding on a hill in my hometown and it rocked, and when the blazing summer comes around I'll be on the beach enjoying it with everyone else.

Be a succesfull liar

How to demonstrate how good you are at lying in 5 easy steps.

1. Take a BAAMC course at Bournemouth University

2. Spend 2 years perfecting the art of bullshite

3. Create a powerpoint presentation, about a fictional advertising agency, which you lie about working for.

4. Give yourself a totally unrealistic job position and create a completely new identity to match your job title.

5. Present this to a group and your tutor, if you are convincing and dont mess up you get a good grade.

Blog 3 Just flow man yeah!

"See its all about flow dude, you've just got to imerse yourself into the zone and shut out all other influences yeah. Its all about feeding your mind without ruining the environment bro."

I'm not talking about drugs, i'm not on drugs either, in case you were wondering, no no no, this week in IMS we have looked at Mihali Cisikzentmihalis' flow theory and how it relates to users of interactive media.

According to the above theorist with the riddiculous name 'Flow is the process of optimal experience'. Hoffman and Novak (1996) suggest that 'the degree to which a users online experiences produces flow determines likelihood of continued use of the web."

Basically, the more imersed a person becomes in a website the more likely they are to want to return and use it again.

To experiment whether flow actually does occur when using the internet, we were set a group task. One member of the group would surf the web, the other members would be observers, with one observer looking at what the surfer was veiwing on the screen and how they were engaging with the website and the other observer looking at the surfers body language and facial experessions. A series of distractions orchestrated by the evil Molesworth were employed to see if the surfers could be taken out of thier transfixed states.

My group consisted of Ellie, Dan and Myself, Dan took the hotseat and volunteerd to be the surfer, I was in charge of looking at his onscreen behaviour and Ellie watched his every move. (spooky eh) Dan was set the task of finding a DVD recorder, he very quickly imersed himself in the task and was soon systematically looking through reveiw websites, price comparison sites and online stores to find the best deal and the best product. He actually began to create his own personal data sheet, by copying text from reveiws and product information from the store sites into a word document. The only distraction which got Daniels attention was when Mike kicked a bin across the room, this proved that Dan had easilly imeresed himself into the task and it took a great deal to bring him back into the real world. Ellie noticed that his face expressed extreme concentration, and he appeared oblivious to being watched, she also noticed that on some occasions he physically moved himself closer to the screen when he needed to input information or when he was reading an interesting article.

Although we all concluded that this experiment had its limitations due to its lab style environment, it was clear that Dan had experenced some level of flow and that Hoffman and Novaks hypothesis, may carry some weight.

See you next time

Blog 2 The Sequel

To recap in the last episode Ed explained that the evil Mike Molesworth had requested a blog from the entire IMS group and anti-blogger Ed had been forced to become a nerd against his wishes. Will Ed, resist the temptation to become a geek? or will he, back down to pressure and lose any shred of cool he may have had? (judging by this introduction, all is lost).

Rite time to use this blogging thing for summat useful.

In our last IMS seminar, we were requested to veiw a website and based on the framework for the analysis of interactive content (Hoffman and Novak 1996) judge whether the site was interactive or not. We were also asked to consider if being interactive was important for all websites.

My group studied www.leoburnett.com, before reading the next paragraph, I make the polite suggestion that you visit the website.

The website appears interactive as it has been built in flash and therefore has lots of clickable icons, the cursor is a pencil which draws pencil lines wherever you drag the mouse and there is an 8 ball which you can 'shoot' in various directions depending upon where you click the mouse upon its surface and the site is also alive with video and audio content. Seems interactive enough, but is it?

How interactive is the Leo Burnett website?


1. Number or linked sources = ZERO

2. Communication Model = One to Many (not interactive)

3. Feedback Symmetry = One E-mail contact link.

4. Range of multimedia = High, Text, Graphics, Sound and video all present.


After analysing the site using the Hoffman and Novak model, we realised that the only interactive elements were the graphics, video and audio on the site. Visitors of the leo burnett website are just veiwers they are not participants, they cannot change the way the site looks, they cannot add content to the site, they cannot even supply feedback to improve the site. Through performing this excersise we realised that the word 'interactive' is too readily used to describe sites that have dynamic graphical content rather than sites where participation is possible and the term would be more appropriate.

Do leo burnett really need a truely interactive website?

Leo burentt use their site as a showcase of their work and thier creative talents, they use it to show off, and to communicate thier values and heritige. We concluded that the site is merely there, to be there, to add value to the Leo Burnett brand and to make sure that the company have an online presence.

Thats all for this Blog. See you soon