written by:Andy category:Personal

Haven't put anything up for a while. Been really busy with the third year at university. Now we've entered 2012 and I'm looking forward to everything that this year is going to bring. To start of the year I've decided to put up an essay I wrote as part of my course. It details the creation and development of online communities.

Abstract

Online communities have grown from a small number of mostly technical users to being one of the most dominant forms of Internet communication. Ostrow (2011) tells us a very real stat...Facebook has passed 800 million users (which Facebook measures as users that have logged in during the past 30 days). While this may currently be the largest site of this type it is by no means the only one. There are a large and growing number of social networking sites all that offer the sense of community. Evans (2011) states, In 2010, there were 12.5 billion devices connected to the Internet. Looking to the future, Cisco IBSG predicts there will be 25 billion devices connected to the Internet by 2015, and 50 billion by 2020. From Flickr to Usenet the amount of data that online communities generate is massive. The topics that are covered can range from comics to cancer support groups and everything in between. From these groups we've seen complex behaviours that can cause as much bad as they can good. Firstly we will look briefly at a technical history of the web. Then we will move on to a closer examine of what community means and how this has changed on the web. Finally we will examine what these changes could mean and where this could lead us in the future.

Download the full pdf here!

written by:Andy category:Personal

The big news is that Wired have started using the Creative Commons agreement on some of their photographs. If your not sure what this means it basically states that you can use or edit any of the photos that they produce under this agreement for free. To start this off they have released 50 photographs that are free to use as long as you conform to their rules. Obviously the photo I've chosen above is one of the 50 but there are some other excellent ones featuring famous people from the world of tech, musicians and just great arty shots. The one thing you have to remember when using these photos on your site or blog is to make sure you put a link back to the original article so that people can see where you sourced the image from. Other than that your good to go.

image source
and here's some information about creative commons if your wanting to use it

written by:Andy category:Personal

Not posted anything in a while thought I better had just to prove I'm still alive. I'm back at university again working hard in the final stage towards my degree. Everything seems to be going ok and I'm enjoying it. I've been working a lot recently on my final stage project I'm building my first iPhone game. I'm not going to go too much into it now but over the coming weeks I'll be posting bits and pieces about the development of it. The image up above is from a site I've been working on for the local pottery preschool that's coming into its final stages now and should be online within the next week or so. I'm just waiting on some images for the staff page.
That's about it really just working hard on my first assignment today, hopefully I'll get that done today so I can do something fun.