History Of Skateboarding.

Skateboarding is believed to have been created by surfers during the 50's who had the idea of surfing the streets. The first boards that were made were home made but skateboards out of pieces of wood carved into a square, however skateboards soon were made in large quantity using thin layers of ply glued together for greater durability. Skatboarding was still a hobby of surfers rather than a full fledged sport.














Skateboarding began to expand and by the mid 60's local competions were emerging for downhill slalom skateboarder, however within a few years skateboarding was almost extinct as skateboard companies ceased to produce boards, and the small number of skateboarders was once again forced to produce their own boards with clay wheels and square pieces of wood.




In the spring of 1975, skateboarding took an evolutionary boost toward the sport that we see today. In Del Mar, California a slalom and freestyle contest was held at the Ocean Festival. That day, the Zephyr team showed the world what skateboarding could be. They rode their boards like no one had in the public eye, low and smooth, and skateboarding was taken from being a hobby to something serious and exciting
Similar to the boards in this video.






In 1978 the most influencial thing in skateboarding history would occur, Alan Gelfand would do the first "ollie". The importance of this is because almost every single trick in skateboarding today has the "ollie" as the foundation.



Skateboarding continued to progress and so came the evolution of vert skateboarding, which is probobly most popularised by modern skateboarders such as Tony Hawk and Bob Burnquist who both feature on the THPS series.



Vert skateboarding took a dive in fame in the early 90s, but skateboarding still remained, though it became primarily street. It was then that Mike Vallely and Natas Kaupas came on the scene and pushed street skateboarding even further. Natas pictured above.

In 1995 ESPN held the first X games which put skateboarding into the mainstream. The other most influencial factor in the mainstream success of skateboaring was the first THPS game which was released in 1999.

Mike Vallely

Seeings the title of my blog is "Skateboard memories" I suppose its only fair I write more than one blog post on the subject, so ive decided that I will write a blog post on Mike Vallely.




Mike Vallely was born in Edison, New Jersey and resides in Long Beach, California. He is the singer in the hardcore band Revolution Mother and in the punk rock band Mike V & the Rats. He also sang for Black Flag on their 2003 reunion shows in Los Angeles. He was the singer for the part of the show where the band played the entire My War album. He is on the Element Skateboards team as a pro skater. Vallely was featured in the popular Tony Hawk's Pro Skater video game series.














This is the Album for "The Days"
by Mike V and the rats.
Heres the the album title song.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=PSYmsJRjq0A

Mike V is such a popular skateboarder because he has such a distinctive skateboarding style and has such a genuine character. Mike V's skateboarding style blends old flatground tricks from the 80's with new age flip tricks as well as grabs and grinds. I think this shows innovation in skateboarding but true loyalty to the past.

Here is a perfect example.



with the perfect contrast of the status quo of modern skateboarding.
This is a video of Mike Mo Capaldi.



Mike V's longevity is not solely due to his skateboarding
skills, because he really is no where near one of the best
skateboarders that there are, he is a character and he is
very genorous with his time and is very down to earth.

For more information on Mike V.
www.elementskateboards.com/team/mike-vallely/

Axiom 49-Key Semi-Weighted USB MIDI Controller

The axiom 49

"So, I just bought an axiom 49 2 months ago on ebay. I purchased it on the 5th of January, and it arrived around a month later. It's a very nice keyboard, and it works very well! I have been playing my keyboard alot. I would like to learn more about the keyboard and have read a little bit about it on the internet, I plan to read more!"

I wrote that as my first blog post and since then ive found and learnt a great deal about the axiom 49.





I really like this video because it shows the ease in recording keyboard directly to your computer.

This is a picture of the keyboard I purchased.

Since then a newer keyboard has

been released which is very similar,

Its called the axiom 49 Pro.

The differences in the Axiom and the Pro are subtle but important.

1. The trigger pads are more sensitive.

2. It has an LCD screen.

3. More pre settings.

More information on the Axiom 49 can be found at

www.m-audio.com/products/en_us/Axiom49.html

Assignment 2

I have to decide to do my second assignment using a data visulisation of the past 10 years of state of origin. So basically what ive done is use google sites to create the the assignment. Initially I wasnt exactly sure what I was going to do for my assignment and actually gained inspiration from the olympic medal tally display that was shown in class. I have used a similar sort of idea and rather than using different sizes to represent the number of victories in a timeline ive primarily used color.

The first page of the assignment is a timeline from 1999-2008, the color of each year signifies a victory to NSW, a victory to QLD or a draw. Once you click onto which year you want to look at the three games played from that year are displayed as colored numbers from 1-3, each color also representing a win, lose or draw. Once you click into a particular game there is a Rugby league birds eye scrum formation setup for each team. Each player has their number and their name above their postion on the feild aswell as their club colors aswell as other notable information such as captaincy or man of the match. Each game also displays the coach of each team and the refree of each game at the bottom of the page.

I began to also link the players to certain lists which had all the players from there clubs who had played origin but stopped because it took way too long.

The Web 2.0

"Web 2.0" refers to a perceived second generation of web development and design that facilitates communication and information sharing and collaboration via the internet.

The term was coined by Del Dolerey in 2004 and he stated that the internet was in a second phase of architecture.



Web 2.0 websites are so popular because they allow people to have contact with people they would ordinarally not have the oppurtunity to contact. The obvious examples of this are through popular social networking websites such as

Youtube-allows you to post video's.

Myspace-allows an easy way to produce a webpage.

Flikr-allows an easy way to broadcast photographs

Twitter-allows you to post small blogs and follow other blogs

Facebook-combines features of Myspace, flikr and twitter.

as well as other things such as tags, podcast and RSS feeds.

as their is no clear definition of what exactly the "Web 2.0" is, people often describe it using websites such as the above websites or anything new and innovative on the internet.

Here is a picture which is shown as a tag cloud displaying the themes of the "Web 2.0".

Web 2.0 websites typically contain any combination of Search engines, Links, Authoring, Tags, Extensions and Signals and have been coined with the acronym "SLATE".

Collective Intelligence
Collective intelligence is collaborative description of a subject to fully describe it. It is used most commonly in statistics consensus decision making and through computer networking websites. The actual definition of Collective intelligence on wikipedia is contributed by over nine people.
Collective intelligence can also be defined as a form of networking enable by the rise of the internet.
From Pór and Atlee's (two founders of Collective Intelligence on the internet) point of view, maximizing collective intelligence relies on the ability of an organization to accept and develop "The Golden Suggestion", which is any potentially useful input from any member.
This allows people to debate ideas
The ability to comment on a subject, rate it or rate another persons opinion enables a system such as Youtube to show what would be considered "bad ideas", clarify misunderstandings and misconceptions about a certain subject based on the collective opinion of a group.
For example if someone posts a video of them self singing a song into a camera, the collective information that would be collected through comments of the video, ratings of the video, ratings of the comment's and the reply of the comment would collectively create what people think of it.
Each video displays a title, a single frame of the video, a collective rating, a view count and who the video is posted by. More in depth opinions of a video can be view once you begin watching the video. This is good so in order to actually rate or comment on something you have to actually open it, the view count changes as soon as you open the video rather than when the video is completed.
The collective opinion of a video on Youtube is based on the Rating and the view-count first and the comments secondly.

Assignment 1 Rational
RationalI have decided to curate an online exhibition.Initially I decided that the most creative and unique way to produce this assignment would be through writing the website from scratch, so that's what I did. I began writing the website and began linking all the pages but I had alot of trouble formatting the website so that it would look like a legitimate website. Aside's from the fact that it is very difficult to format a website well without using an advanced program I found myself constantly looking through tutorials on Youtube and reading information on countless websites on writing code properly and trying to learn how to link websites, pages insert drawings and the general layout of the website etc. I found myself spending hours on the code and looking at it at the end of the day having almost done nothing. Eventually I decided that the website layout was taking away from the actual assignment of Creating an online exhibition.I have decided to present my website using Google sites. I have found the that Google sites is very easy to use, and is appropriate to produce the assignment with. The general website layout is already automated and there are around twenty pre-setting’s to chose from as well as it has a html alter mode so you can view the code and edit it and make it even more unique, this allowed me to create borders as well as use Photoshop to create texts and import them as images to have better looking headings. The only problem I have had with Google sites is that I cant remove the headers that are displayed on the top right of each page.Rather than just having one page I wanted to use some basic linking to different styles of photographs as well as pages dedicated to videos, links and a slideshow. I decided to do this because if I did decide to make the website bigger it would be far easier to find things as well as it would be easier to present things within groups because they would be on different pages and therefore there would be a clear distinction between different styles within the site.I looked through several other websites on how a photographic website could be formatted and I gathered that most websites were quite basic and didn’t take away from the focus of the website which is the photo’s. Most other basic photographic websites displayed photographs one under another with a caption explaining basic details of the photograph such as where it was shot, what it was shot on, shutter speed and aperture settings and a basic thought of the work or what they were trying to achieve. I basically tried to replicated this method, but I wanted to give a basic overview of how long exposure photography is produced so I did so on the cars page. Google sites also offers easy access to Youtube video’s without all the code so I thought it would also be good to utilize this feature, video’s are more exciting as well as they provide music etc. I also used slideshows which were also easy to access from Google sites, I used Picassa which is a website that looks really good and is very easy to use. Using Picassa I could put photographs directly into a folder and produce a slide show with all my own specifications.I decided to have a theme of pink text on black background with purple and blue as secondary text colours. I think the black symbolises the night and the bright colours over it symbolise the similar colours you get from a longer exposure photography. The whole site flows within the theme of night. To conclude I’m very happy with the way the website has turned out, its simple but effective and has a flowing theme.

API's and Mashup's

So, this is the second blog today and ive decided that im going to do as many blogs as possible while I have nothing to do. So, firstly im going to be talking about API's. When I first learnt about API's in class I didnt know what they were and after the teacher showed us, I thought that they could only be used for searching as we were using Yahoo pipes.

I decided to go on Wikipedia and find out more about API's and I found out that Youtube was associated with these and you could customize them yourself. This was perfect as now I could put one in my website and make it unique

Here is an example of one. This one has custom size, and color as well as I control the content.



Here is the link.


Next I will talk about mashups. Mashups, a term generally associated with DJ's however if you use other words to describe mashup such as compilation, unifying, joining and collection the idea of a mashup becomes a bit broader.


Examples of mashups could be of:

Photo's (slideshows)
Music (remixes)
Video's (video compilations)
and any combination of each or all.

RSS Feeds

RSS Feeds

So, I havent blogged for quite a while so today I intend on catching up. First post will discuss what I have learnt from RSS feeds.

Although RSS feeds aren’t anything new to me, I havent used them for quite sometime. In keeping with the theme of this blog I have been I have subscribed to everything skateboarding.
The first feed I got was one from a company called 411vm who release a movie each month following particular people within the skateboarding world, wheather they are skateboarders, filmers, photographers or members of shoe, board, truck, wheel or bearing companies. This RSS feed provided information on general skateboarding and was very broad issues to do with 411vm.

The second website I went to was www.skateboard.com, and provided far more options and allowed for a far sharper search. The available RSS feeds page is here. I was interested in what a Professional skateboarder might talk about in a blog as they constantly travel and are exposed to the best and most competitive skateboarding in the world so I subscribed to Nate Sherwood's blog.

The third RSS feed I decided to subsribe to was one from a famous magazine called "Thrasher" Its the oldest skateboarding magazine there is, and it covers the most issues. Its an American based magazine an so it's generally american but it provides information on Ametuer skateboarders all teh way up to Professional skateboarders. Information includes competion results, deals and interviews. The page is here.

Skateboard memories.

Skateboarding memories

So, this is my second blog. This time I thought a bit about what I could write about and eventually decided to write about my favourite past time, Skateboarding.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9qiOJ0Ofz0I

I started skateboarding when I was around 13, and stopped when I was around 17. Initially, I started skateboarding because my cousin's had skateboards and had friends that also skateboarded. The first skatboard I got was given to me by my friends older brother.

When I went to high school I met alot of other people who skateboarded, and I became friends with basically everyone who did, I spent countless hours with my friends skateboarding.
All my memories of skateboarding are happy, so many day's spent with my friends enjoying Canberra. I remember every significant event on a skateboard. First ollie, first stairs, first mini skated, first kickflip.

Every one of the those events was significant and each alone was motivation to continue to progress. there are three reasons why I continued to skateboard for so long, 1. The satisaction of being scared of something but doing it anyway, 2. practicing something for weeks and weeks and evenutally learning how to do it and 3. probobly the most important. The community of it. Skateboarding actually has no real communal structure, yet everyone has a mutual respect and admiration for each other.

The skateboarding community was the best part of skateboarding. A large community of skateboards would be guaranteed for either a competition, a professional demo or a movie premiere. The most exciting movie of the time was an american movie called "yeah right" it had the best skateboarding and filming, but most importantly it captured the essence of the sport. Here is a preview.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O8sTKcBItyk