I can now carry around my blog in my pocket! Just so you all know 🙂

WEBER JANE AV SELF PORTRAIT from Jane Weber on Vimeo.

“It is better to fail in originality than to succeed in imitation”

– Herman Melville

After posting an old photo in my last blog, I wanted to try a photo blog simply because photos hold so many memories and it would be sad to not have them around.

This one was in 2003, when my Nana came from Ireland for my Grandparent’s day so for once I had both of my Grandmothers with me!

Talking about my Grandmother, here is a picture taken of her when she was a child.

I love this photo of her contrasted with the one she got taken of my uncles here:

The different photography methods are fantastic between the photos. The colouring in on that last one just looks comical now! And yet each photograph can hold so many memories.

Let me indulge myself twice more. This next photo is one of my favourites of all time:

And finally, one that was taken recently. My housemate brought out her polaroid camera on my friend’s birthday and we took this picture, as much as I spend so much time with my friends we realised that we didn’t have any photos taken together. So this is one of the first pictures I have with Eddie with my housemate’s strange sense of humour in the comment down the bottom!

We’ve been talking about the digital era taking away books and now everything is written on computers but when you think about it, the concept of photographs will stay around for a long time and even though how they are taken and stored may be different I believe they will remain as they always have.

So my mum is heading back to Ireland in 2 weeks time and I am terribly jealous. I miss my family so much and would love to see them again but I also miss Ireland. I love the country, all the green, the terrible weather, the culture, the music. Last time I was there, I took this picture when we went to the local pub in my aunt’s town.

All the locals just bring their instruments to the pub and play along with each other for hours. It’s such a nice community. I feel like this is harder to find in Australia, as much as we have a great culture here and I wouldn’t trade all the beach cricket and BBQs in the summer, or our Christmas’ spent around the pool with all the windows open trying to keep the house cold whilst cooking the roast and Paul Kelly’s How To Make Gravy blasting in the background.

Anyway, I just thought I’d have a little reminisce.

I’m not sure if it’s just my ‘friends’ on Facebook but recently my entire newsfeed has been taken up by this ice bucket challenge. I understand that it’s raising awareness for ALS, however, after watching some of these people tip bucketsful of ice over their heads most of them haven’t even mentioned the disease. It’s now become all about the supposed joy of filming yourself getting an extreme cold shock.

So just in case, you also don’t know what ALS is I’ve done a little research and here is a link to the ALS website with some more information. I have even found something that I believe is a better solution to the ice bucket challenge, rather than saying tip a bucket of ice over your head in the next 24 hours or you have to donate (making it sound like a bad thing), there is a new phenomenon sparked from it called the #ricebucketchallenge, raising awareness for poverty by encouraging people to donate buckets of raw food.

On another level, it’s amazing to see the new and creative ways that people are using the internet and social media. This craze has gone viral very quickly and has gotten multitudes of people involved. From friends that I haven’t spoken to in years, to my aunts, uncles and cousins in Ireland to my neighbours next door. Plenty of celebrities and public figures are getting involved too. Here’s one John Mayer did:

Anyway, as much as I disagree with the lack of respect given to ALS in some people’s challenges, it’s a great way to utilise the internet and social media to raise awareness.

“We must write with an awareness that we are writing in the presence of other texts”

For me this sentence in the Hypertext reading by Landow really clicked as to what we are doing when we are writing online and this is the major difference between content online and in a book. Yes, when writing in a book you can reference another person’s work but there is no physical connection between your text and theirs. Whereas, online there is a link that can be clicked which physically connects the two pages.

This is something we should be fully aware of, that we’re writing within other texts and this can potentially change how the message we are trying to get across is decoded by the reader and how we are potentially changing the message the other text is trying to say.

Having just moved from Canberra to Melbourne, I still am linked to all things Canberra in social media. ACT policing have been using social media to find people who have committed some form of crime. This works very well in Canberra as it’s such a small community so it doesn’t take long for someone to recognise the person in the CCTV footage. This week this post has come up on my news feed about 4 times.

Here is a screen shot of their latest attempt where someone threw a punch in Civic outside a nightclub and they’ve shared a video and CCTV photographs of the man on social media waiting for someone to recognise them. As you can see, 438 people shared this one post of quite a few they put up.

I simply wanted to comment on this way of justice enforcement using social media and see if anyone else had any thoughts about the matter?

HTML is something I never even considered I’d be doing – I guess that makes me network ignorant in some way. Despite the fact I still think of myself as a content created rather than a web designer, I now do believe it is an important thing to learn even if it is just to further understand the way the system you are working on functions. Betty had me a bit scared in the tutorial she took of our class describing it as another language and I’ve never been good at second languages – I learnt Italian for 9 years and can barely say “Hi, how are you?” But in the tutorial, I was pleasantly surprised. I throughly enjoyed learning how it all worked and found that I picked it up pretty quickly.

I disagree with what Brady said about it being a bit of a waste of time with Dreamcatcher and such taking over because even if we don’t use it on a daily basis it’s still nice to have that background knowledge.