Monday, June 11, 2012

My Customized Google Map


I want to showcase the use of maps for students. I have created the map with the features that are essential to know for the students who come to Karlskrona, Sweden (my home town) to study higher degree courses like masters degree.

The features are:
·      3 Supermarket locations for busying daily groceries etc.
·      2 Banks.
·      Railway station i.e. Karlskrona Central Railway Station.
·      2 Hospitals. ( 1 main hospital and the other centrum vardcentral)
·      4 Restaurants.
·      Library.

I have created the talbe “markups” in the database with the same number of fields as resource 1 suggested. And then I have started adding locations, and I have used resource 2 to get the longitude and latitude values of the locations.
And in main map.html page, I have added more location placeholders with the names as restaurant, library, bank etc. and then added the icons, which will be suitable for these locations from resource 3. And then I have changed the central position of my map so that all the locations of the map are shown in one frame. I have also modified the zoom level to 14 and the window width and height of the content frame. Check the live example HERE


Mashups

Mashing is the compounding (“mashing”) of two or more pieces of complementing web functionalities to create a powerful web application. This is usually achieved through the use of Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), where API’s are the defined, and generally published, interface of a software or hardware that can be addressed and used by another software. According to Webopidia – “Web sites. A mash-up, for example, could overlay traffic data from one source on the Internet over maps from Yahoo, Microsoft, Google or any content provider. The term mash-up comes from the hip-hop music practice of mixing two or more songs.”

According to WIKIPEDIA – “The main characteristics of the mashup are combination, visualization, and aggregation. It is important to make existing data more useful, moreover for personal and professional use. To be able to permanently access the data of other services, mashups are generally client applications or hosted online.”

I have used Yahoo Pipe to create a pipe to showcase latest posts from my blogs ( one is cooking blog (www.vegetariansworld.blogspot.se) and the other is my web designing blog (www.mywebdesigningworld.blogspot.se ) ), along with latest news info from my favorite news website Telegraph ( www.telegraph.co.uk ). And I also want to experiment with yahoo local search. I have tried to search one near my home town Karlskrona, but that location search is not available.

Check my Yahoo Pipe


The wire frame behind the pipe is as show in the picture:

To read the whole report CLICK HERE

Tuesday, June 5, 2012

Post Study Reflection of Social Network

For the past 5 months, I have been studying about various social networks that are present in the current web world for the users using which one can share the information, collaborate, share media etc.

I have been analyzing the website in-regards to the characteristics described here < CLICK HERE >

After the study of social networks impact on current society, educational field and other related fields, my opinion on the social networks have changed.

Here is the video which shows a little glimpse of the post-study reflection.



The following summarize my post study reflections:


  • I used to think that people only use social networking websites such as Facebook, twitter etc to share their details about the personal life. But after closely observing and following these sites so far I am kind of hooked to them. One can explore new dimensions. I have observed that so many education institutions are using these websites, to inform their students about current news or information about the courses, assignments and deadlines. I am currently following Luleå and Umeå university websites, that is really helpful for the students.
  • Facebook seems more like personal social networking site, but on observation and analyzation I came to know that, there are so many apps that are present ( As Facebook Pages). One can even subscribe to the updates of the news channels, entertainment channels etc. In the same way Twitter is also being used for updates. But in comparison with Facebook, I found that Twitter is more sophisticated and easy to use. 
  • In Facebook the information the user wants to update is known as "Wallpost" but in Twitter it is called as "Tweet".
  • In Facebook there is no limitation to the number of words that user wants to enter, but in twitter it is limited. So the information is precise direct to point. 
  • When user share the links those links will change the url that is displayed to the user in Twitter, but in Facebook, it is shown as Thumbnail.
  • Even though both websites offers photo sharing, in Facebook , the users can create albums and share them with the people by either giving link to the album or by adding them as friend. But twitter does not allow that.
  • If user adds another user in Facebook, they called Friends, but in twitter they called as Followers.
  • Twitter uses @ and # symbols for discover and relate topics, there is no such terminology in Facebook.
I have seen some of the presentation of course peers about their post study reflections.

  • There is one about Twitter, and even though I do agree about spam in twitter as presented in the video, there are security options available for the user, so as to avoid spam effect. I have been also using the twitter and tweeting for the past 4 months or so.. but i did not found this kind of annoying spam tweets. 
  • I have seen one more video about Myspace. The presentation made me to explore more about myspace, upon doing some research I found that myspace is little confusing and privacy options are not so much sophisticated as the others. But still it is another great website.
  • And its great to see slideshows about facebook, they have shown all the important information in regards to the website.

Site Evaluations

Just finished one of the assignment for the course of Social Software & Web 2.0. This assignment mainly focus towards the collaboration and also evaluating the sites that offer different services for the users.


I have shared the following apps in collaboration part of assignment.
  • Office Live Work Space
  • Doodle
  • Shutterfly
  • SlickPic
  • DropBox
  • Groovshark
  • Raaga.
For complete report < CLICK HERE >

The second part involves the evaluation of the sites. To read the report < CLICK HERE >

The online presentation of the above websites is provided as a screen cast with the help of Quicktime in Apple's MacBook Pro.