My Usage of YouTube

I personally use YouTube for the hosting of videos for my website. Having only recently discovered the statistics section of the site I can say that I find the data presented to me very interesting and can certainly see how it might prove useful to a musician trying to work out his/her target audience. Data present includes gender and age, two of the most important factors in contributing to decisions regarding marketing.

Here is an example of the statistics given for my “Channel”:

Ed Harcourt and MySpace

Some key elements of the MySpace music profiles are displayed on Harcourt’s page. 

First of all, the music player, which is obviously almost vital for a musician to showcase their talent and allow their fans to hear new material. One of the options given to musicians is to allow fans to add a song from their profile’s music player onto the fan’s profile, which starts playing whenever friends access their page. This is an excellent form of promotion as it means people other than fans get to hear the artist’s music without even going onto their music profile – if the friend likes what they hear, they may well become a fan too! Also shown on the music player are statistics – these could easily be used to gauge which songs are most popular, and therefore which songs would be good candidates to release as singles. 

Second, is the ability to customize the look of the page with backgrounds and banners, and the option to incorporate some CSS. Whilst it is impossible to completely change the layout of MySpace profiles (due to restrictions set by the company) the ability to change backgrounds and add banners is used to great effect by most artists, creating a sort of ‘brand identity’ for the profile.

 

Another extremely important feature within MySpace music profiles is the option to add blogs which can be linked to from the profile, and a gig calendar which details upcoming shows (displaying times, dates and locations on the profile itself, as well as optional information detailing age restrictions and ticket prices if a gig link is clicked on by the user).

  

Furthermore, videos can be uploaded directly onto the site and viewed through MySpace’s own video player. Whilst the quality of this player is perhaps not as high as some other video hosting sites, e.g. Vimeo, the convenience of being able to add videos to the page without having to go elsewhere and link to them is a definite bonus. 

All-in-all, it seems MySpace is quite the complete package.

Further Design Considerations

• Being very proud of the Photoshopped effects applied to the source picture of the bass guitar, I chose to set this background image to fixed, so that it may stay in view even if the user scrolls down. I believe this also stops the page from looking boring, as the very dark brown on its own may do if you had scrolled beyond the picture.
• Opacity settings have been used in order to ensure the image is not entirely obscured as the text boxes scroll over it.
• Whilst modern browsers support the “opacity” setting, older browsers such as Internet Explorer 6 and below require an opacity filter to be applied in order for the effect to work.
• Also, due to older browsers not being able to render PNG file alpha channel opacity properly, I have used a work-around in the form of a JS script found at this website: http://homepage.ntlworld.com/bobosola/index.htm This perfectly renders the main header with full opacity, where a grey background would have appeared otherwise.
• Furthermore, due to slight differences in the display of elements such as widths and colours between browsers, I have appended the “!important” tag, as values stamped with this are ignored by Internet Explorer and applied by Firefox, allowing for different values to be entered to give similar end results in both browsers.
• I have opted to increase the line height of the main content to 130% and font size to 110% in order to aid readability whilst also ensuring the text can be resized, a problem found by using constant values such as “pt” to size font.
• Floats are used in order to display content side by side, for example in the case of the navigation menu and main content box – a feature which would have to be taken care of by tables if only HTML was used, and would create unnecessary code.
• Whilst it is not used within my pages, the CSS code I have produced also features the option to implement an image replacement technique, meaning that images can be used as headers for example (if the designer wishes to use more elaborate text than standard font alone can provide), by applying the background image element to an H1 tag within the CSS. However, there is a problem with this in that no alt tag can be provided for the image, and screen readers will not be able to see the H1 as it is just a background image. Therefore, I have used the negative text indent technique as proposed by designer Mike Rundle, meaning that the H1 text can be written within the HTML and it will not appear on top of the image, ruining the effect of the new header:

.imagereplace {
            background-image: url(image.gif);
            width: 500px;
            height: 300px;
            text-indent: -5000px;
            margin: auto;
}

Activity 1101: Where I am with my assignment

I am currently between points 2 and 3 – Planning the assignment and Putting it together. I have decided on my technologies (YouTube, MySpace, Blog), and my user group (music group or musician, or manager/promoter of group). I have an idea of disadvantages and advantages of all the technologies, and I have also found a few sources to use with quotes about MySpace. I have also designed two different CSS templates for my website, and can adapt these as needed in order to fit the assignment criteria if they do not already.

I will be looking for more sources to use (particularly peer-reviewed journals, as at present the sources I have are not peer-reviewed), and start putting together the elements of my assignment this week.

Activity 803: Publishing using a social web site

Publishing on the internet via Facebook again has many disadvantages and advantages,

Advantages include;

• Users are provided with a news feed that shows recent posts, uploads, comments and messages
• You have the opportunity to choose who you want to view your content
• Facebook offers higher security, for example users have to be friends with you to view your content
• Facebook will send an email to users when they have received a comment or message.
• You have the opportunity to tag people in content such as posts and photos to ensure they see them and have the chance to comment
• Facebook is designed as a social network so there is a larger captive audience

Negatives include;

• You have to be a member to view ANY facebook content unless they have received an email with the direct link to the content but they wouldnt be able to comment or do anything else.
• You have to be friends with people for them to see your content
• Updated posts are not displayed on the news feed meaning the site doesn’t inform you of friends for them to see and comment

Activity 802: Publishing using a blog

Using a blog publish material offers many advantages and disadvantages. 

Advantages include;

• Blogs can be a positive why of gaining regular feedback and discussion
• Many blog sites are free to join and use meaning it doesn’t stop people from joining or replying to your post
• Its easy to update
• Maintenance is controlled by the website owners so you don’t have to worry about it

 Disadvantages include;

• Negative responses from users and members can be a downside
• The website maybe closed due to maintenance or site problems meaning you cannot access your blog and other people can’t comment on it
• You cannot customise your page or blog to the extent you can on your own website
• Some blogs may not get comments or discussion so you should think about your content to attract readers and comments

Activity 801: Publishing using a web site

Publishing on the internet via your own website offers advantages and disadvantages.

 Advantages include; 

• Allows the user to be more creative and design the page to the needs of the user or the topic being discussed.
• You can offer web advertising space.
• Freedom to publish information to your website whenever you like at anytime of the day, some publishing sites may have closed for maintenance or perform slowly.
• It looks more professional to have your own site rather than publish on someone else’s.

 Disadvantages include; 

• Having your own website is expensive to run.
• You have to be responsible for the maintenance whereas publishing sites deal with this for you.
• Publishing sites such as ‘Facebook’ and ‘WordPress’ act as sites for discussion, with the option of comments and posts.
• Being in charge of a site means you have to know and understand the HTML code to allow you to create, maintain and publish on it.
• Publishing sites can be more accessible for disabled users as they already have CSS in place for users that require assistance with technology such as screen readers and voice recognition devices.
• Some publishing sites offer a spell check facility, and this can be something that doesn’t come with your own website.