Navigational Labels!

 Above you see a picture from the www.reclaimgames.com website. This website is the one that I will be reviewing the navigational labels and placing in a table. This site was made by a friend of mine as the start of a portfolio and is currently being developed beyond this.

Label	Destination Heading Label	Title Tag
Home	Home	Joshua Graham - Home
Projects	Projects	Joshua Graham - Projects
Music and Art	Music and Art	Joshua Graham - Music and Art
Contact Me	Contact Me	Joshua Graham - Contact Me
Check out some sample code	Blog	Blog

1. What labels you did not like and why, and suggest improvements. I believe most of the labels are quite good, the one that I did dislike though is the "Check out some sample code". The reason for this being is that the user has to be on the home page to find the link, its not found in anywhere else and is hidden away inside the actual content. I believe this should be another navigational link on the right hand side with the other labels for ease of access.
2. Whether there were any inconsistencies in the labeling system between the pages (in terms of style, presentation, syntax, granularity, comprehensiveness and audience). As stated above the "Check out some sample code" navigational link does not conform to the rest of the labeling system of the site and should be rectified. Another discrepancy I found was the Title tag of the destination page of that label as well with it just being "Blog" where it should be "Joshua Graham - Blog" at least to stick with the website standard.
3. Examine at least two other similar or competing web sites.  How similar are the labelling systems?  Is any one site clearly the winner (and if so, why)? Looking at two other portfolio websites, they all mainly follow the same rough style of there being a main link bar standard across all of their pages but they do not have any links inside the actual content. I believe once this website is fixed up and completed it will be on par if not better then the other two.

Alphabetical Order, Is It In The Eye Of The Beholder?

www.gpaustralia.org.au

To make things easier to find in lists, people use different ways to order the lists that they have. A lot of these ways vary between people but there are some set standards which a lot of people follow, for example 'a' to 'z' and 0 to 9. The way I would order a list in alphabetical order and a few questions I have outlines are shown below:

• #!%&: Creating Comic Books
• $35 a Day Through Europe
• .38 Special
• 1001 Arabian Nights
• Albany, New York
• El Paso, Texas
• H20: The Beauty of Water
• New York, New York
• Newark, New Jersey
• Plzen, Czech Republic
• Saint Nicholas, Belgium
• St. Louis, Missouri
• The 1-2-3 of Magic
• The Hague, Netherlands
• The Lord of the Rings
• XVIIme siècle

1. Did you put The Hague under T or H?  To keep things simple, I placed all of the words in alphabetical order based on the characters and not on preconceptions that certain words such as "the" or "a" should be ignored. The title "The Hague" has a first character, 'T" for "The" and therefore placed it as such.
2. Did you put El Paso under E or P? The word "El Paso" as with the above question, I took the same road and placed it based on the first character of the word, which is 'E' and placed it accordingly.
3. Which came first in your list, Newark or New York? The words "Newark" and "New York" were a bit tricky to start off with, but after careful consideration I decided to place "New York" first and then "Newark". The reason for this being is that I treated the space inside "New York" as a special character, which I believe should have precedence over letters.
4. Does St. Louis come before or after Saint Nicholas? In this list I have placed "Saint Nicholas" before "St. Louis" as 'a' comes before 't'.
5. How did you handle numbers, punctuation, and special characters? The way that I have decided to order things, was to put special characters, such as *&^%$, first, then would come punctuation, followed by numbers and finally finishing with letters.
6. Assuming the italicised terms are book titles, what might be a more useful way to organise this list? If we are having only one list, I believe this is still the best way to order them, but if we were able to use multiple lists. I believe it would be best to categorize the individual lists into groups such as books, locations and so forth.
7. If the cities represent places you’ve visited and the book titles are ones you’ve read, how could chronology be used to order the list in a more meaningful way? Chronology could be used in especially well with books, as you could place the series names in alphabetical order and then place them in chronological order to make it easier to see what books you have read already and what you haven't. Cities on the other hand, would be slightly more difficult to put into chronological order and thus I don't believe it would be a better way to order them.

What Is An Information Architect?

www.bruceclay.com

An Information Architect is, in common terms, someone that specializes in the way information is distributed in a medium. For example, the role in which they play in the development of a website, is that they control and shape the layout, structure and the flow of information to best show as much information to the user possible, while making it easy to read and comprehend. Some of the specific things that they design on a website include the navigation links, pictures and just the general content.

Web 3.0, The Future?

With the advancement in technology the how we browse and utilize the internet is changing greatly. With the consolidation of physical and the immaterial information of the web, we are starting to already experience the web in new ways, people are able to email or text their coffee machines and fridges are hooked up to the internet!

Privacy is going to be the biggest concern with the way the web is going, already there has been outrage with the new Xbox console the Xbox "One" from having an always online connection and its sensors via its Kinect to always be observing and I personally think its only going to get worse as technology continues to advance with less and less of our lives being private.

While things will definitely be more technologically based, I can't see it blurring what humanity is because you will always need that human element. Im excited to see what happens in the future but I'm also cautious.

Facebook Terms of Service and Privacy Policy!

 Most people now a days use some form of social network, be it Facebook or even Steam. While so many of us use these social networks next to no one ever reads their Terms of Service or their Privacy Policies and therefore don't really know what they are signing up too.

As Facebook is one of the biggest if not the biggest I have chosen to review its terms and how it uses our information. Before we can discuss what they will do with your information, you have to know what information that they actually take from you, this is all listed here (https://www.facebook.com/about/privacy/your-info). If you read through this, you will see they take a LOT of information down about you. This ranges from all the information you put down when signing up, like your birthday, place of work to family. Then they also use anything you post, (pictures, links or statuses) or are tagged in, these are what you would expect them to use from a company that profits from gathering information, but the other stuff that they record, is what really intrigued me.

Facebook also takes down basically anything that you take enter into it, be it mouse clicks or searches, Facebook games and your computer specs. If you search for a friend on Facebook and don't add anyone, they take that search history. Nothing that you have or do on Facebook is private from them.While they do have your information, I believe Facebook isn't malicious in anyway by obtaining your information, they specifically state "We only provide data to our advertising partners or customers after we have removed your name or any other personally identifying information from it, or have combined it with other people's data in a way that it is no longer associated with you.". This statement to me, as long as they do what they say, is fair use of our information.

Facebook provides an excellent service, FREE of charge, it is only natural that they find some way to continue this service and they do it by selling our information but anonymously. With all the information they gather us, they need to protect it, for some people this information documents their entire lives and could be quite dangerous in the wrong hands! Luckily enough Facebook employs its own team of security staff and also has a bounty for third parties to find security flaws.

For the amount of enjoyment everyone gets from using Facebook and the amount of time people spend using it each day, I believe that sharing a little information is worth it.

To Use A Feed Reader Or Not To Use A Feed Reader, That Is The Question.

Use a feed reader of your choice to subscribe to several feeds for sites that you frequently visit. Write a blog post about your experience after using a feed reader every day for a week. What are at least two benefits and drawbacks of using a feed reader? 

For my first official "down to business" blog post, the first thing I'm going to do is, review a feed reader, noting the positives and negatives that I find. The feed reader I have decided to use is that of the Feed Reader 3.0 Gadget for Windows.  

The reason I had chosen this particular reader, is because of it syncing up nicely with my desktop and thus would be my first positive note! I found the reader very convenient, with only having to log into the device and setting the sites that you want to get updated on once. I found this convenient as all of the news sites I had subscribed to, (Kotaku and Lifehacker), were on my desktop awaiting for me to read every time I turned on my computer, or even accessed the desktop. So the first benefit is definitely convenience. The next benefit I have found is the ease of use, as stated above it was basically set and forget! But now onto some of the negatives.  

I found that while I liked the convenience of the it is still no where near as interesting as reading the articles on their original form/sites. While the RSS is easy to use and convenient it can't show pictures or videos which usually go hand in hand with the Kotaku articles I am usually interested in.  The other thing that I didn't like, is the fact that you cant easily sift through what is shown to you and it brings up everything that is contained on the site.     

In my opinion, the positives while are good, for me, they didn't outweigh the negatives in my opinion. While for some it may be worth it  but it doesn't give me the same enjoyment as reading the articles on the sites that they were originally posted on as I like the visual aspect of it all. 

My First Post!! An Introduction! :)

Hello fellow bloggers and readers! My name is Michael George and I will be the one blogging on this here site!

I am currently doing a Bachelor of IT, majoring in Multimedia and I expect to graduate next year! After I graduate from Griffith, I hope you get a full time job in any sort of IT company and on the side start my own little ventures in indie game development.

This is my first blog so hopefully my writing styles and my posts get more interesting as I learn more and start working out how to work these things properly! From what I've assumed this course is about maintaining content online and keeping it up to date, but I'm sure I will soon learn that there is a lot more to this course!

Hopefully my posts are interesting enough for you to stick around and im looking forward to blogging for you!