#DICG101 Web Project Final Reflection
Hooray it’s done.
My web project initially began as an idea focusing on the quiner (it sort of means 5) things in life. What started as top 5 lists became 5 word reviews and from here, the idea began to sprawl across the interwebs many faces.
At first I found it hard developing the idea and ascertaining popularity. It took a bit of old fashioned labour (see spam) but I began to produce a lot of content in the hope that people would eventually follow. My first reviews were generally negative or sarcastic in the hope that people would disagree and supply their own. I even began reviewing things twitter’s trending topics in a bid to drum up a following. It has worked to a degree, as I would say about 60% of the twitter content is my own, the rest belongs to the rest of the internet and retweets.
I was able to view the progress of this through RSS feeds. I had set up a feed searching for #5wordreview on twitter and could now see who was creating new content.
After a while I began to realise that I couldn’t hand in a twitter code as my sole project, so I began expanding, trying to appropriate the ideas from class. First up came the Tumblr and twitter tie in. Here I could get my basic 5 word ideas, expose them to another social network and add my own brand of folksonomy.
I began tagging posts, initially following simple tagging rules. Once I realised the readership wasn’t increasing I began throwing in a few screwball tags for a bit of fun. Tagging like this is a bit of a gamble, it is hard to tell if any of them will work out.
Moving on from tagging, I went to Flickr. I initially struggled adapting this platform into my project until I began reviewing and creating galleries related to five word reviews. I have then added these galleries and favourites to RSS so that the progress can again be monitored. The purpose of expanding into Flickr relates to the idea of interestingness that I already blogged about. As the images i review/comment on are added to a gallery and favorited their interestingness goes up and hopefully so does the coverage of five word review.
Finally, the address lewis.5wordreview.com has been set up to redirect to the google site for the project. The google site has been set up as a central hub for the project’s many arms as well as detailing the process behind the idea.
What started as a pretty basic idea has since required a great deal of work. The original goal of the project was to rely on user generated content and this has been achieved to a degree. Whilst I am still the primary producer, the idea has been adopted by other Internet users. It has got to the stage where I feel that if more labour and content is continually churned out then people will create their own content proportionately.
