Thursday, March 29, 2007

The experience of using Wiki

For the idea of Web 2.0, Wiki is the actual form to apply this idea meaning after we read the book or obtain the information we need, we can also contribute our understanding or knowledge to enrich or improve the contend we just read.
In internet, the website "http://en.wikipedia.org" is just like an encyclopedia, but more user-friendly from my personal using experience. Recently i am busy doing my fyp, and i need a lot of relevant and basic knowledge. If i search through database, the scientic journals are extremely difficult to understand, and give me many extra and abstract knowledge. another advantage of wikipedia website is that it has many hyperlinks within the paragraph, i can easily browse the terms i am interested in, and get the explanation and information.
Besides using wikipedia website, we also have the chance to participate in our textbook " mobile web 2.0". In edventure, i can edit in some comment or do some minor changes to improve the original writing. In the process of reading, if i am quite sure of certain terms used in the text, i can check and find out the meaning, and then add on. If next reader has the same problem to understand the same term, he or she can benefit by enhance their understanding and saving their time. It is a good experience for me. it is the first time i read the textbook while can contribute to it as well. This chance of participation makes me have a sense of responsibility and belonging. Unfortunately, i have not finished reading the whole textbook before the closure of wiki.

Monday, March 19, 2007

About youtube

As we are required to upload our project to the website youtube and let the public access our project, then according to the number of audience and their grading, it is an another way to judge our project both on the content and aesthetic appealing.after we got a user ID for youtube, we failed to upload our .swf flash file, because youtube can only accept video file.
what i could do is to search a software which can convert .swf flash file to video file in the form of avi, mpg or rm. There is a software called "Flashants SWF2Video Pro" which can serve our need. It scans the .swf file for two times.First time it generates the sound, and at second time, it generates the movie. one problem obsessing me is that my computer cannot catch the sound automatically from the flash, but it has to go through my microphone to catch the sound. i have tried many times before i figured out that i clapped the microphone tightly between my earphones although the effect may be not satisfactory. As the microphone will catch all the sound, it must be done in a quiet surrounding without much distraction. unfortunately my roommate did not realise that i was doing a such delicate task. i said to him in a kidding way that his fabulous voice would be shown in youtube.
After generating the video file successfully, my partner was shocked that the 3- minute-long video file is 631M bytes large. i did not know why it was so huge, and i tried to find another software to compress and make its resolution less. then i found this software called "mediacoder" which can convert any video file easily from one form to another, and even some editing. Luckily it downsized my giant mpg form to just 3.47Mbyte avi form.
I think my partner and i had tried really hard to persuade his friends and relatives to view our project and give high grading in youtube, although it cannot reflect truely the quality. I am really enjoying the wonderful experience and this process of making and uploading our project.