Peer feedback

Time flies so fast, it comes to the end of this course as well as the whole semester. I really enjoy the moments I have studied with my classmates. They also have their own strengths that I would like to learn from. It seems that every group has published their digital projects. Honestly, those stories are all great, I love to watch them. Each group/individual has their unique creativity that help to make those awesome stories stand out.

There are two different groups that I feel interested in their stories. Thus, I will give them my feedbacks in the below:

Crematorium Café (Chi, Nitami, Alex, Florence)

Thanks guys for creating this great story 🙂

 Strengths

•  Content

I really like the way they create a character (Ebony Warren) who has many different feelings when she falls in love with Stephen and those feeling are so real. It reflects some part of myself when I discover their story. Besides, Ebony Warren’s Facebook is really similar to a real Facebook account. On that page, she has many friends, her hobbies, her books, and her likes etc. She also shares interesting post, likes friend’s posts, comments to others. Honestly, I did not know this is a fake account until I read the Alex’s note on Linkedln group.

In addition, this group also puts current trendy of social media into their content. Today, it seems that people use social media platform to share their feelings, thoughts with their friends and their special ones. People, especially young people like me cannot live without technology and social media, just like Ebony.

• Technology

They create the interactive website for their project which helps me as audiences have a recap on everything of the project. This website provides all social media platforms that they used. It also gives a brief of story for audiences catching up.

Weaknesses

• Content

Although they applied really well current trendy, I think the content for their website is quite wordy. I did not spent time to read all of this and many words make the website look a little bit messy. I suggest they remove some unnecessary parts when Ebony uses Twitter and Facebook to chat with her boyfriend. As audience, I expect to see more pictures or more short films rather than reading words.

• Technology

When I clicked on the blog’s link to explore more, it did not work. I think they should make sure to activate all the hyperlinks and check again them before publishing.

Besides, when I discovered Ebony’s story, I did not know what I supposed to next. I suggest they should have some simple guidelines for audience before they start jumping into story word such as touching your mouse pad or turning on your headphones while interacting with the story.

Mr. Badinglish (Jessie, Janet, Yuri, Angela)

Thanks your story guys, I help me release stress during deadline time a lot.

Strengths

• Aesthetic

I really like the logo of this group because it is simple but beautiful. They also present it in the video by making the similar appearance for main character – Yuri.

• Technology

The quality of the video also is really good. I like the way they edit light as well as colors of the video, it makes all character stand out. Besides, the scripts also support greatly for audience’s understanding. They also add the next video links at the end of each clip so it helps me follow the whole series easily without disruption.

Weaknesses

• Content

Although they make the clip really good and funny, I still think it is quite similar to the famous Italian man serious on YouTube that I watched before. I suggest them to make something more relate to other accents or something that tourists might feel interested in Melbourne’s accents.

• Technology

In my opinion, sometimes their sounds are quite low, especially in the video clip 2. I cannot understand if they do not provide subtitles. I wish they could increase the character’s voices a little bit

Website data

After doing a quick research, I recognize that wordpress.com does not support Google Analytics, it only can use on WordPress.org by adding plugin.

From http://en.support.wordpress.com/stats/

However, WordPress.com has their own stats tab to support users so I decide to use it to analyze my website’s traffic instead of using Google Analytics.

Firstly, I looked at the graph that showed my traffic in terms of visitors and views for day, month and weak. The measurement of time depends on which filter I will choose. I decided to examine my traffic for weeks.

Views and Visitors

I was quite surprised with the number because it was not low as I thought. Moreover, it is increasing gradually over months. Besides, some of my posts in specific days such as August 11 have high numbers of views and visitors, approximately 3 views per person.

Stats on August 2014

Most of my views are from Australia and I can guess this result before I see the map because most of them are my classmates and others. Then, to examine further the views by country, I clicked on Summaries and chose 30 days filter to see the appropriate result. Australia and United States are two top countries that mainly contribute views to my blog. Besides, there are some people from Russian Federation who viewed my blog. I noticed that the map also uses colors to emphasize the number of views, so I can recognize easily which countries is the top one.

Views by country

In addition, there is table that presents the totals, followers and shares of my blog page. I chose the spam tab to explore more and feel happy with the result. Askimet, the one that I set before in order to avoid spam, has protected my site from 5 spam comments.

I also examined the Tags and Categories table and it shows that although I used many tags, there are only 8 tags with high number of views.

In order to improve my website’s traffic, I believe researching for appropriate tags will be my first consideration. I cannot ignore the power of tags that helps to increase both views and visitors for my page. Also, I think I need to use less tags but those tags have to be relevant and trendy because my method that using whatever tags pop up in my mind is totally not effective. Besides that, I think I need to define my specific target audiences for my blog to match my writing style with their interests to increase the views. In addition, I only publish my writings on WordPress page, I have not shared through my other social media channels to connect to my other friends and lecturers. Thus, I will definitely try to do that in order to spread out my works and probably get more views and visitors.

Overall, I believe analyzing website’s traffic after a period of time is really helpful. Looking at those statistics make me realize what weaknesses that I have to find solutions to improve as well as what strengths that I need to keep and develop them.

My infographic

This is an infographic I have made to mention about my Strengths and Weaknesses

Thoughts on Digital Story Project

Finally, our digital story project for Contemporary Media Work Practice has done successfully. We work together to help Nicole share her yoga journey to people.

Our group includes 4 members: An Tran, Anthia Mirawidya, Courtney Coulter and Yao Guo.

This is the summary of our group’s project:

• Story’s Background

Nicole used to be an actress but it made her feel really depressed and stressful. When she seemed to get lost with her career, he found herself again when she started practicing yoga. Over time, yoga helped her to get back her self-confidence and also increased it. After that, she also wanted to help others can be better like her, can find again her true center so she started her journey as a yoga teacher.

• Nicole’s brand – Discover your center

Our group decided to take “Discover you center” as unique brand for Nicole because through the interview, she shared that she really wanted to help her students to find their own centers. Therefore, we thought that “Discover your center” would be the appropriate philosophy to use in order to promote Nicole’s yoga journey.

• Nicole’s brand values include

Growth and connection

Discovery

Self-awareness

• Project’s target audiences

Age: 18+

Gender: both female and male, but primary audience will be female

Geography: Australia base

• Strategies for social media

Aim: We use social media as tools not only to share Nicole’s journey but also to raise Nicole’s profile as fresh yoga teacher and interact with her audiences.

Mediums:

• Personal Blog

This blog will be the main place that houses Nicole’s digital story. It has some main categories such as about Nicole, Nicole’s tips and yoga philosophy, class timetables and contact details. Besides, it also connects to other social media platforms such as her Facebook page, Instagram and Twitter.

• Nicole’s Facebook page

Connects to Nicole’s digital story’s on her WordPress blog.

Weekly scheduled posts of yoga quotes that we added in Nicole’s photos

Daily updates, posts and shares

Likes to local and international yoga pages

Promotes Nicole’s video through Find Yoga Facebook page (this post is pending approval)

Find Yoga Facebook page

• Nicole’s Twitter

We will use some of key hashtags from our research in her tweets to get more followers:

• #yoga
• #meditate
• #mindfullness
• #haiku
• #spirituality
• #yogapose

Scheduled posts of Nicole’s yoga photos, which are also linked to her Instagram.

• Nicole’s Instagram

We will post Nicole’s photos with quotes and 15 seconds videos. It also links to her Twitter account.

• Scheduling updates and posts

Hootsuite is used to schedule updates for Facebook and Twitter

Hootsuite

Facebook also has this function, so we tried it to schedule our post as well.

Facebook schedule

Individual Reflection

• Content

To share Nicole’s journey to audiences, we created a video to tell her story. It divided into three different stages: her past, transitional process and her current situation. We also used still images and Nicole’s voice through the interview to support video content.

Besides, we also have posts such as photos with yoga quotes, tips, hashtags that are scheduled on her social media channels. Those things will help her to interact with audiences as well as increase the number of likes, shares and followers.

• Aesthetic

Although the main purpose of us is trying to market the yoga practice of Nicole, we attempted to make everything look and feel naturally as much as we can. We do not want out target audiences might feel the video is too much branding. Thus, thanks to Anthia, she created simple but beautiful logo for our project. It has 2 different versions, which help to present Nicole’s brand. The green version we use for video and the other for sharable contents.

Green Logo

White logo

Besides, we also let Nicole and her friend act in the most natural way and did not force them to follow us. All of lights, yoga poses came into the camera lens as the way they really were.

• Technology

With the basic knowledge and skills we have learnt from Industrial Media, we decided to use the Z5 camera for creating film. We used one with tripod and other to go around. We also captured photos with 3 different DSLR cameras. Besides, we used Zoom H2 to record the best sound during the interview. Moreover, we edited the final video with Premier Pro software and used music background, which had appropriate creative common license from archive.org.

• Processes

I believe our group did really well. We had many meetings during the making process. Most of the time, we used imess and gmail as main channel to contact each other. We worked together in order to discuss the idea for our project, plan for shots and angles of the video, interview’s questions, divide workload for each other. My part mainly focused on photography and camerawomen as well as supported others on doing social media and hashtags research. At the same time, the others girls worked on editing process and social media as well.

• Collaboration

I thought our group worked really well together although we were completely new to each other. Although we had many other assignments to do, we attended all the group meetings and shared workload equally. We divided tasks for each other depending on our strengths and weaknesses. We did not forced each other to do anything so we did not have any arguments during our project and I really appreciated it.

In general, I am happy with the final result of my group for this digital project. This was the first time I could have a chance to do anything to market for the real person and made a promoting video for her. Also, I have gained a lot of experiences from this project as well as can apply theories of Mip and Mop tasks into my story to make it stand out. Finally, I would like to say thank you to my teammates and instructors for helping me go through my first semester.

Rhinos in Melbourne

I still remember the first day when I came to Melbourne and something funny happened to me.

In my hometown, Ho Chi Minh city (Vietnam), we only have buses as our public transport and we do not have any kinds of trams or trains like in here. Vietnamese people use motorbike to travel to anywhere. Although I already know train because I used it when I traveled to Singapore and Thailand, I have no idea about trams. Therefore, in that first day, when I waited for trams to hang out with my friend, I saw the poster on the opposite side and it said, “Beware the rhino”. I surprised, I did hear from my friends and news that Australia has many wildlife animals. My friends also told me that they even saw Kangaroos crossed the streets. So I asked myself what? They have many rhino crossed streets and have to put this poster for warning people? Then, I asked my friend that question and he burst out laughing. I didn’t understand until the tram came and my friend said, “This is your rhino”. Yeah, I laughed so hard after that.

Now, after 3 months living here, I enjoy a lot my new life and my study at Melbourne city where has many rhinos travel around.

This is the tram stop I mentioned above. It has been updated when I visited it again in the afternoon. They added more information on the poster.

My story’s location – Taken at stop 60

This is the poster before the update of Yarra trams – Taken from http://www.yarratrams.com.au/using-trams/tram-safety/passenger-safety/

Search engine comparison

Google search engine seems to be the best and obvious choice when I need to find something for both studying and daily life. I have never heard about either DuckDuckGo or instaGrok search engines until my instructors introduced me during this course. I am really interested in doing research for cake recipes. So, I decided to use those 3 different search tools to find “chiffon cake recipe” for me.

DuckDuckGo (DDG)

Taken from https://duckduckgo.com/?q=chiffon+cake+recipe

The presentation of DDG site seems quite similar to Google. However, it only has 3 tabs on top of website in terms of Recipes, Images and Videos. There are 35 recipes that I can choose to examine. Although, they do not provide many results, I really like the way they show recipe with pictures and numbers of rating stars. It is really attractive way to hook my attention. I also notice that when I click on one of those links, they do not turn to blue like Google. It means that DDG does not track your information as their slogan on main page “DDG, search engine does not track you”. However, they still use cookies to track users if we do not turn off because I see that there are grey checkmarks next to every links that I have visited. Besides, I look at the region and it states that “no region” which is totally different from Google. Overall, I love the idea of trying to protect user’s online privacy. However, this site definitely is not good for marketing and advertising companies because they cannot get consumer’s data from DDG.

instaGrok

Taken from http://www.instagrok.com/results.html?query=chiffon%20cake%20recipe

This search engine is totally different from 2 others. They present the results of my research through a kind of mind map with many different keywords that relate to my cake recipe such as oven, sugar, flour etc. I do not like that presentation at all because it is not attractive. I think it would be benefit for studying research because they have provided really useful key facts of specific key words. They also have notes which is really good tools when doing research for assignments. Besides, there is a lack of images and I cannot know exactly how many results I get from the map. I also research to find out whether instaGrok tracks its users or not and know that InstaGrok is the combination of DDG and Google. Although it tracks you to improve the searching on its site and does not sell consumer’s data to any third party, it can access to all of your information if you log in to social websites on instaGrok website. However, we have the choice to do it or not.

Google

Taken from https://www.google.com.au/?gws_rd=ssl#q=chiffon+cake+recipe

It always makes me impress because of the huge results it can provide me in terms of web, images, videos, news etc. I received over 900,000 results within only 0.29 seconds for my chiffon cake recipe. It still remembers what links that I choose to visit before by marking those links as purple. I do like all of things that this search engine has bring to me but I do not like the way they try to find every method to track me as well as get my data to sell to third parties.

Overall, I think looking for different search engines to know the way they work and treat user’s privacy is really interesting and useful. Sometimes, Google seems not to be the good choice so I will try DDG and instaGrok when I have chances.

Hashtag Research

Using hashtags on social media platforms is not completely new to me. However, I only use hashtags on my Instagram account to get views and followers. I am not a fan of Twitter so I rarely access to my account as well as attaching hashtags in my tweets. Thus, this research exercise not only provides me more idea about the use of hashtags on Twitter but also relevant information to my developing digital story project.

Twubs

Firstly, I use Twubs to explore potential hashtags for my project. The first hashtag is #yoga. Before appearing the correct hashtag as I expect, the site also suggests to me all of hashtags that relate to the key word #yoga.

Taken from http://twubs.com

Although Twubs does not show the total number of tweets and retweets of #yoga, it provides list of contributors who use #yoga and others hashtags people use when they tweet about #yoga such as the following:

• #meditate
• #mindfullness
• #haiku
• #spirituality
• #yogapose
• #fitness
• #yogapose

Those keywords really help me to expand my digital project idea. It shows me different topics that people might feel interested in when they think of yoga. Therefore, I know which relevant information I should try to put in my digital story in order to create the human interests. Besides, it also has the list of top contributors at current moment and it will change over time. Therefore, I can visit those Twitter account easily and start following them.

Rite Tag

To discover the specific number of tweets of #yoga, I try to search it on Rite Tag and the result is really impressive. Rite Tag gives me the summary of 6 different statistics per hour for my key word in terms of unique tweets, retweets, potential views, tweets with images, tweet with links and tweet with mentions.

Taken from https://ritetag.com

One valuable finding from this summary I think most of tweets about #yoga contain either images or links and the number of potential view depends on the number of tweets as well as retweets in a period of time.Rite tag also has graphs to describe those statistics so it is really easy for me to know the trend.

Taken from https://ritetag.com

My hashtag is really popular so it has 300 tweets and over 200 retweets per hour. Therefore, I know that there is an advantage for my digital project to get high followers by using this hashtag.

In addition, Rite Tag shows me most recent influencers as well as top ones with specific numbers of followers. Therefore, I can choose which account I should follow and tweet them in order to get more followers for my project.

Taken from https://ritetag.com

#hashtags.org

This is the third site I choose to explore more the use of my hashtag #yoga over 24 hours. Although the graph was in US time but it still helps me to figure out which period during 24 hours will be the most popular time to tweet. Therefore, I can consider when running Twitter account for my digital story project.

Taken from https://www.hashtags.org

Besides, the #hashtag.org also provide 5 top #yoga Prolific Users. I try to explore the first one New2Yoga and she has a large number of followers. I realise that she not only use her own images but also from other users who tweet about #yoga to increase her followers. I also discover the Get Fit Yoga blog that contains all of sources that relate to #yoga and it collect all information about that hashtag from many different users on Instagram and link those sources to Twitter. I definitely use these awesome huge sources for my digital project and learn that my project cannot get more followers by using only our materials.

Interactive Storytelling

Rome

Taken from http://www.ro.me/film

This website was created to promote Rome album of Danger Mouse and Daniele Luppi. It is a multiplatform interactive narrative experience inspired by the music in Rome album.

At the beginning, I was really annoyed because the site required me using Google Chrome to access. Unfortunately, I use Safari and it did not load so I have to download Chrome to explore Rome. Then, I really like this interactive site because I not only listen to the song as usual, but also interact with the film, the story world. I was put in the character’s point of view so it seemed like everything happened in front of me. I expected more interactions from site but I only could move my mouse to change film’s angles. The song’s length was nearly 4 minutes so it made me feel really boring. When the song finished, the site would ask us to explore that song in different ways and I did try to see something more. However, there was no difference.

Besides, they had different tabs to explore. I tried the Album tab and it contained pretty enough information such as photos, YouTube videos, news, ITunes etc. They also linked their site to their social networking pages in terms of Facebook and Twitter. I think those things are very useful because I am quite like the songs and want to explore more about Rome album as well as main singers. The other highlight point of this site probably was the colorful animation and beautiful music lyrics that contribute to blur the boring interaction.

In general, I have learnt from Rome that using interactive storytelling is not always good if we cannot make it enough for audiences to experience. Simplicity is great if we really know how to apply it in storytelling, otherwise it would not be able to create a wow effect for our story.

Bear 71

They used the introductory clip to take me into the story world of a female grizzly bear in Canada’s Banff National Park. The story was narrated from the bear’s perspective. Although it was typical for documentary, it provided me the general ideal of what I was watching about. I wished that they could use the sound effects to make the narrator’s voice sound like the bear’s voice. It would be more real and interesting.

Then, they presented the interactive map that allowed me to track for the bear’s activities after she had a tag called 71 on her ears. With over 1 million photos take by motion-triggered cameras that encompass the park, audiences like me can witness those activities when we click to camera points on the grid. All the animals and us were presented on the interactive grid by small points that had specific numbers. I really love the interactive map that brought people closer to natural environment of living animals like Bear 71 but it was quite messy when I started exploring it. I did not know which way I should go or which footage I should come to visit first. Besides, sometimes the Internet connection seems very slow so it effected on my exploration. I think it would be better if they provided audiences the highlight points to look at or guideline for using the map to avoid confusion.

Moreover, users are even turned into animals if we allow the site to use our webcams and post our images to the surveillance wall. However, I denied trying this function because I did not want my images appear on public sites. I believe with current online privacy issue, producers should consider that some of users like me do not want to interact with content if our private information would be accessed. In addition, the audio of Bear 71 worked really well in providing people what happened to the natural habitat and how animals like Bear 71 get used to the huge change from manmade things such as high way, cars or the use of Facebook.

Overall, I think I would not apply this kind of interaction for my digital project because it was quite complicated and created some confusion for users. However, I would like to learn the way they used audio in order to make Bear 71’s narrative flow naturally.

Take this lollipop

Taken from http://www.takethislollipop.com

The first thing I noticed when opening this website was the huge number of likes on Facebook page, over 15 millions. However, think I was the result of asking audiences to connect with their Facebook accounts if they wanted to interact with the story inside. The lollipop with one razor blade inside and the text “I dare you” helped me guess the general theme of the story. That could be horrible and scary thing.

Then, I realized my thought was true when entering story world. The lacking light and narrow way that leaded to the dark room appeared. Besides, it worked very well with the scary music and made me felt like I was playing horror web game. However, the scariest thing was my Facebook contents appeared on one strange man’s computer and he looked completely weird. This guy tried to stalk my images and his acting really made me as interactive user feel scared and unsafe. I think this is the success of this interactive site. At the end, the bloody lollipop appeared to announce the next victim and also provided the share button.

Overall, I think this is one of simple but effective interactive website in telling digital story that I can learn from to support my digital project. With the music effects, images and contents that all relates to horror genre, it really hooks the audiences attention. I believe that success is contributed by the unity of all visual design, effects, music and genre. However, I do not like the way they use my Facebook information as well as others as a scary part of their story. Those things are private and most of us really do not want to be stalked by weird people like that horrible guy.

Time to reconsider Online Privacy

Another interesting article I found from my RSS feeds is “The ‘Snappening’: Explicit Snapchat images leaked via third party, reports say” on theguardian. It stated that explicit images from 200,000 users of the app have reportedly been leaked from third party app. More important, most of those users are teenagers and their photos had gathered many years by the third party before posting them on a website.

Taken from theguardian.com

Although Snapchat videos and images will disappear 10 seconds after being received but it is still possible to collect them by taking a screenshot in that time. This article recalls me the nude photo scandal of famous Hollywood actresses due to the lack of security of iCloud system. It also makes me afraid of sharing my private files, photos and documents via online servers such as iMess, Google Drive, Dropbox, Photobucket etc. Currently, I believe that there is no strong solution to deal with this danger problem and as smart users we cannot wait for anyone else’s protection rather than ourselves. Also, I think privacy would definitely be the controversial concern for developers to think of before creating any application for users. As young generation of Internet and mobile users, I tend to not rely on sharing tools and apps anymore because of the low level of online privacy.

Although the producers such as Snapchat and Apple always say that their protection level is strong enough to keep their users’ stuffs safe, it is definitely not correct. Therefore, I have started using some solutions to protect myself from those hackers. The first solution is creating passwords for all of my files if I upload them on any sharing websites and set them at private setting to limit the access. The second is using again USB or hard disk to store documents although it is inconvenient and we might forget to bring those stuffs. I also do the research and there are some other ways to help you protect their online privacy such as

• Guard your date of birth and telephone number

Never display your full date of birth. It is a key piece of information that many providers use for verification. The same goes for telephone numbers, especially if you lose your telephone and are trying to re-create your contact list.

• Make yourself more difficult to find on social media

Consider using a pseudonym on social media sites. You can also use unique email addresses for each website you join. Most online email providers allow you to do this by appending extra letters (eg “fb+”) to your existing email address. This will make it difficult for strangers to search for you on social media sites and if you start receiving spam at that address, you’ll know exactly where the spammers found your address.

You can find more information here. Overall, this article is like the alarm, reminds me again that we are really vulnerable when we go online. Therefore, it would be better to start to do those simple steps to strengthen our online privacy before it becomes too late.

Vine Application

Although the RSS feeds have been established for a long time, I did not interest in using and consider it as one of effective research tools that until doing this course. I thought that RSS feeds were a little bit messy but it changed. Thanks to the suggestion from my instructors, I can add and look up those RSS feeds easier now. You can check out The Old Reader if you want to discover more about RSS feeds management.

I prefer exploring topics that relate to social media trends and interesting application for mobile phone so I choose to subscribe news on those topics. I have found an awesome article about Vine application for all iOS, Android and Window users on Mashable. Check out Vine website to explore what this application really is.

Back to the article I have found, it makes me really surprised. They introduced 12 innovative and impressive stories which were created by Vine users. All of them are stop motion clips and limited to six seconds. Going through all 12 clips, I really love the creative way that people use Vine to build their own stories in many different angles. Also, they know how to use the special function of Vine as a pretty cool tool to draw their imagination.

Honestly, I already know Vine when it launched in April 2013 but I did not notice to its special function which helps to distinguish it from the big one Instagram until I read this article. With Vine, you can make shared video clips with sound and it lets you to control the making film process because you can start and stop your video by tapping your fingers on the screen. That means you completely can let your imagination out when filming. It allows you to have gap time to set up scenes and create any characters for your stories if you like. It is totally different from Instagram because you can record the video in 15 seconds but you cannot stop it to add in any interesting things.

Although designers and stop-motion artists created some of those video clips in the article, I am pretty sure that we can do it as well. I also look up some Youtube video clips and figure out that using stop emotion to produce videos definitely is not hard at all. You can see the instruction through this video below

I have downloaded this app again to my mobile phone to explore more those impressive things. I believe this can be one of useful tools which requires less technical skills from users to create their own stories from daily life. We do not need any complicated editing software like Premiere Pro or Photoshop to produce stories that we want. All we need simply is our imagination or the need of capturing all meaningful moments in our life.