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Elizabeth Tourtelot
Chapter 10 Assignment
22259
10/13/09
Last.fm is an Internet radio and music community website that also has music videos, which all is available for free for visitors and users. It is free to create an account but the site does not require people to subscribe to, or create an account, to listen to the music or view the videos. If you do create an account and are a registered user of Last.fm there are more perks to the site, mainly the personalization aspects of the site. The personalization aspects include how the site compiles the artists you listen to, building a detailed profile of each user’s musical tastes (recording details of all the songs the user listens to), and then suggesting other artists you might like (using a music recommender system), and even comparing your music tastes to other users and showing you how compatible each of you are. The site is intended for music lovers of all sorts, not limited to any certain age group but I have noted that there are more younger people that are users of Last.fm.
Last.fm has many types of multimedia- including audio, video, flash, and streaming audio. Users can listen to their personal music collection on a music player application on a computer or an iPod with an audioscrobbler plug-in or they can listen to the Last.fm internet radio service (either with the Last.fm client or with the embedded flash player). There are also official music videos and other videos imported from YouTube that are available to be viewed on the relevant artist and track pages. Most currently popular and other well known artists have tracks available for streaming, although there are significant gaps and the most recent releases are not always added immediately. There are also a significant amount of songs with no track audio due to other reason; users are not allowed to upload copyrighted audio files, but the commercially available albums are added regularly by the Last.fm staff. There are also charts that Last.fm creates to show the favorites, or most listened to artists, from around the globe- from “top artists”, to “loved tracks”, “top tracks”, “hyped artists”, “hyped tracks”, and “top tags”. I think that all the multimedia that is present on Last.fm services a purpose and contributes to the effectiveness and over-all convenience and popularity of the site.
http://www.jkrowling.com/accessible/en
This site is the official site of the author of the hugely popular Harry Potter books, J.K. Rowling. The site is full a interesting little tricks and surprises, fantastic graphics, and amazing flash animation. To really take in all of the immense details of the site one would have to explore it for a while and even then they might not take note of absolutely everything. The site originally only consisted of a list of publishers for the Harry Potter books but in May 2004 the new site was started; the new site possessing a sense of fun, which coincides with the essence of fun that is present in all of Rowling’s creations. The site features all of the aspects that one would could wish for in a fun web browsing experience and which a Harry Potter fan relishes.
As you navigate around the site the audio changes- there are various different household/everyday noises that can be heard in the background- from passing traffic, a dog barking, a doorbell ringing, wind chimes blowing in the wind, the buzz of a fly, birds chirping, and the tic of a clock. Instead of plain old hyper linking of text it is set up as an image map, the site has objects as the hyperlinks- so to go between different areas of the site you would press on one of the objects, also known as portkeys, on the desk and the screen will disappear and zoom into a different area. Each area, or room, of the site has a whole different look and it is an absolutely terrific, visually pleasing site- one area has a butterfly flittering off and onto the page, a spider skittering around, another with a fly buzzing around and landing on a window which has wind chimes outside it and a scenic view of a town, another with a radio that can be tuned to different channels and listened to, and another with two flies buzzing around a trash bin with other random object scattered around it. Overall I believe the multimedia elements that are present on J.K. Rowling’s web site make the site even more enjoyable and contribute greatly to the utility of the web site.
This web site is the official site of NASA- National Aeronautics and Space Administration and one that I enjoy visiting because of the multimedia elements included on the site. On the home page of NASA.gov there are a great amount of photo previews of different aspects of the NASA site that one can find by exploring the site. The photos and text are hyperlinked to lead you to the correct place, so it is easy to figure out how to get to the area you want to go. The whole site is full of fantastic images that are taken by the Hubble Space Telescope and the other cameras and telescopes out in space, along with artists’ depiction/interpretations in some cases. At the home page there is an animated slide show of NASA Images- Image of the Day, the recent news dealing with NASA, access to NASA TV and Video area, blog updates. One can also find on the NASA site: NASA RSS Feeds, video and audio podcasts, interactive features, HD Videos, browsers, players, and plugins, and much more.
The site is very user friendly, in that at the top of the page there are groupings that one can choose out of in reference to what it is exactly they are using NASA for; for example you can pick For Public, For Educators, For Students, For Media, For Policymakers, For Employees, and MyNASA which personalizes it a bit. The site is also very kid friendly/oriented with it’s NASA Kid’s Club, where kids (of all ages) can play educational games- and have a fun experience with the different audio and visuals. I used NASA.gov to do research for a Geology project a few semesters ago and ended up using one of their videos as part of the presentation part of the project- with great results; it proved to be a very useful and informative site that makes researching a fun experience.
