Reflective writing on chat 17/01/2012 + New Interface Ideas

Today we had an interesting chat about SOPA, content farms and the future of the internet, google and social networks as we know them. Osiris told us how companies like google have around 60% of the content that is generated by 'robots' through these so called content farms. Jonathan spoke to us about how the internet is trying to evolve by becoming more personalised and specifically designed to cater to individuals. I think he called these "wall gardens". We agreed that even though these spaces are safe and can be a teaching aid, it's nice to wander outside of them, and it's crazy to think that one might not be able to do this in a few years time.

Needless to say I am completely against SOPA and believe that censorship and limitation will lead us nowhere. It is true that internet is changing us, but we should evolve and adapt to this new life rather than bring the shutter down for fear of losing control and money.

Jonathan also introduced us to Net Vibes where we can see all the feeds to the MA DA course blogs; fantastic way of keeping track of what everyone is doing!

So that's a little about today's chat. This evening, Maria my awesome developer came over so we could discuss the interface a little bit. I had some issues with the fact that the user would have had to refresh every time in order to be introduced to a new chance algorithm. So we changed it and now each time the user carried out an action (Play / Pause / Drag / Resize) various things can happen. 0 - 3 videos can turn off or on. These videos can be either films or watercolours. (The watercolours will have a music layer attached to them). 0 - 15 chopped recordings might also play / stop. The recordings will not have a visual representation. I will have around 8 videos showing up on screen at one go. We also tried changing the background to black; this is good because the videos look better, like they are floating, but it's harder to see where to grab the handles to drag / resize. Just a quick screenshot of the test Maria did today:

Test videos on a black background using PHP / CSS3 and HTML5