YouTube Channel hits 100000 Views and Counting

Was delighted to see my YouTube Channel setup just 13 months ago has just gone past 100,000 views. The channel has a little over 600 videos covering anything and everything from Building a PC to Roller Coasters, Aquariums, Dredging and even setting up a Motion Capture system.

Why I don’t know but my most popular video at just under 5,000 views is a POV video of the Blue Flyer Roller Coaster at Nickelodeon Land, Blackpool, Pleasure Beach. Why this is I really don’t know as I have posted several other Roller Coaster videos that are far more exciting. On the best day this video peaked at 57 views.

The next post popular video showed the process of Installing an Intel Core i7 3930K Hexacore CPU on an ASUS Sabertooth X79 Socket 2011 Motherboard. This video was uploaded in July 2012 and has reached 4500 views. The most popular day peaked at 44 views.

At just under 4500 views the third most popular video shows the process of Installing the Corsair H100 Radiator and Pump within a Cosmos 2 Case Sabertooth X79 MB 3930K CPU.

At 3000 views a video showing Hogwarts Castle at Universal Studios Orlando essentially being attacked by Voldemort, hasn’t been as popular as I would have expected it to be. Quite a few of the lightning strikes happen very close (although in the distance) to the Castle, creating some interesting scenes.

A video of a Chinook Helicopter performing at Lecuchar Airshow received 238 views on the evening that it was uploaded. It was amazing to see the maneuverability of the aircraft. I uploaded just over 100 video clips of various aircraft from the airshow amounting to about one hour of footage.

Another interesting playlist coming in at four and a half hours of footage shows the Nordic Giant Dregder working in Aberdeen Harbour. The most popular video in this series shows the Imposing Hulk of the Nordic Giant and the Liebherr P995 Excavator hard at work.

Perhaps a more unusual playlist is that showing a set of blank screens in various colours ranging from White to Black and on the Red, Green and Blue. The most popular of these at roughly 2500 views is that of a Blank White screen and nothing else.

Perhaps the cutest video posted is that of a family of Dwarf Mongoose – a little surprising to see it has received just 79 views, on the other-hand they are not the most active and energetic of creatures.

So what makes for a popular YouTube video – well certainly it seems that people enjoy staring at video containing white and nothing else. Videos with an element of comedy seem to be very popular, and of course PSY Gangnam Style surpasses them all at 1.25 billion views, even Justin Bieber – Baby ft. Ludacris trails behind at almost 830 million. Will we soon give up watching television and go towards online digital content only?

Beautiful Blogger Award

A special thanks to Lance Romel who nominated me for “Beautiful Blogger Award”. Thank you so much lancepost.wordpress.com for counting me in.

7 facts about me:
1. I love seeing interesting Architecture in cities & towns around the world
2. Enjoy the odd spot of hillwalking
3. Spent some time venturing around the Canadian Rockies – some amazing scenery.
4. Big fan of Star Trek and Star Wars
5. Still haven’t joined Facebook
6. Have worked with at least 30+ computer languages
7. Big fan of the Lord of the Rings (though read about half of it 20 years ago).

My 7 beautiful  bloggers are:
1. northernnarratives.wordpress.com
2. tomshorephoto.com
3. tonentimbre.wordpress.com
4. astrawberrypatch.wordpress.com
5. francineinretirement.wordpress.com
6. theelementaleye.com
7. fieldsofspirit.wordpress.com

Thank you all bloggers for sharing your good articles, together, we can make the world beautiful.

Award Rules:

1. Copy the Beautiful Blogger Award logo and place it in your post.
2. Thank the person who nominated you and link back to their blog.
3. Tell 7 things about yourself.
4. Nominate 7 other bloggers for their own Beautiful Blogger Award, and comment on their blogs to let them know.

One Lovely Blog Award

I’m so excited to have been nominated for the One Lovely Blog Award! – What an honor…Thank you CopperLeaf Treasures!

Ok so here are the rules for this award:

-Thank the person/people who nominated you and link back to them in your post.
-Share seven possibly unknown things about yourself.
-Nominate fifteen or so bloggers you admire.
-Contact the chosen bloggers to let them know and link back to them.

Here are some possible unknown things about me…

1 – Have been interested in Astronomy for probably 25 years or so.

2 – Have generated roughly 3000 tweets in my first year on twitter.

3 – Have reached about 90000 views during my first year on youtube.

4 – Christmas just isn’t Christmas without Indiana Jones, Flight of the Navigator, ET, and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.

5 – Have written about 220 Blog posts during my first year on wordpress

6 – My most popular video so far after a year on youtube is of the Blue Flyer Rollercoaster in Blackpool UK

7 – Have taught in areas ranging from Parallel Computing and Virtual Reality to Mobile Computing and Video Production!

Here are my nominations:

Cardinal Guzman

SpeedDemon2

Barry Howie – The Art of Photography

Manhattan – Faces & Places

Rick Holliday

A Thoughtful Eye

The Perspective

Thoughts and Expressions

Letter from Norfolk

Sam Whelan Art & Technology

Photo and Coffee

PixoGraph

Aces Flying High

What Andy Sees

BMH Online

Blog of the Year 2012 Award

dcdoolan.wordpress.com was recently awarded a star toward the “Blog of the Year 2012″ award by fictionalmachines.com!  I really appreciate this nomination, and fictionalmachines wonderful & informative blog can be experienced –>here<–

The “Blog of the Year” award is a little different from some other awards, because you accumulate stars.

Here are the ‘rules’ for this award:

1] Select the blog(s) you think deserve the ‘Blog of the Year 2012’ Award

2] Write a blog post and tell us about the blog(s) you have chosen – there’s no minimum or maximum number of blogs required – and ‘present’ them with their award.

3] Please include a link back to this page ‘Blog of the Year 2012’ Award – http://thethoughtpalette.co.uk/our-awards/blog-of-the-year-2012-award/‘

and include these ‘rules’ in your post (please don’t alter the rules or the badges!)

4 Let the blog(s) you have chosen know that you have given them this award and share the ‘rules’ with them.

5 You can now also join our Facebook group – click ‘like’ on this page ‘Blog of the Year 2012’ Award Facebook group‘ and then you can share your blog with an even wider audience.

6 As a winner of the award – please add a link back to the blog that presented you with the award – and then proudly display the award on your blog and sidebar … and start collecting stars…

Yes – that’s right – there are stars to collect!

Unlike other awards which you can only add to your blog once – this award is different!

When you begin you will receive the ‘1 star’ award – and every time you are given the award by another blog – you can add another star!

There are a total of 6 stars to collect.

Which means that you can check out your favorite blogs, and even if they have already been given the award by someone else, then you can still bestow it on them again and help them to reach the maximum 6 stars!

For more information check the FAQ on The Thought Palette.

*Here are the nominees [In no particular order]:

- richardwiseman.wordpress.com

- dratarrant.wordpress.com

- theuniversityblog.co.uk

- disperser.wordpress.com

- smithiesshutter.wordpress.com

- briangaynorphotography.com

- themainstreetanalyst.com

- techartzz.wordpress.com

Another huge thank you to fictionalmachines.com & another huge thank you to everyone who supports my work on dcdoolan.wordpress.com.

Versatile Blogger Award

Little did I know that when I started my venture into the world of social media at the beginning of this year that others out their in the blogosphere could nominate you for awards. I was delighted to see today (30^th April) that I have received a Versatile Blogger Award.

A special thanks to Sharing My Italy … The Blog  (30^th April 2012) for this nomination (see post), I again received this award two weeks ago from Zen and Genki  (16^th April 2012 (see post)) but hadn’t blogged about it at the time as I was trying to decide on what other blogs I should nominate, now certainly seems to be a good time to do this.

As per the rules of being nominated, I am to:

•  Thank the person who gave me the award (Done!)
•  Include a link to their blog (I’ve done that too – above!)
•  Select 15 blogs/bloggers that you’ve recently discovered or follow regularly.
•  Nominate those 15 bloggers for the Versatile Blogger Award and include a link to their site.  Here they are:

1. Dreams and Zeros
2. Alex Mufatti
3. Brian Gaynor Photography
4. Sam Whelan Art & Technology
5. Klaus Rossler Photography
6. Observatorydiscoveratory
7. Travelwithscott
8. Clive Jennings Photography
9. A New Yorker in Paris
10. Postcards for Colorado
11. iPhone Photographer
12. The Blissful Adventurer
13. Craig Hill
14. The Thesis Whisperer
15. Ramblings of this guy you know!

And finally – Tell the person who nominated you 7 things about yourself.

1. I enjoy TV shows such as Battlestar Galatica, NCIS, CSI & Star Trek to name a few.
2. I lecture is subjects ranging from computer programming to graphics, video & multimedia.
3. Signed up to SETI@Home over 12 years ago (during its first year of operation).
4. Have a keen interested in distributed computing (hence SETI@Home).
5. It’s only been in the past month I have build  a computer myself from scratch, done lots of upgrading in the past, never a complete build.
6. Have been interested in Astronomy for as long as I can remember.
7. Archaeology has always been of interest (perhaps due to watching Indiana Jones so much).

And finally to end this post with a spot of colour

A Semester of Social Media

Late yesterday night I received my 10,000th wordpress view. This is well timed as the semester has just come to an end. Friday was the last day of classes, from what I heard during the week quite a large number of students were planning on seeing the Avengers movie at the cinema once they were finished. I am sure all the honours project students have been busy over the weekend as they are due to submit their final reports and implementation tomorrow (Monday 30th April). I am supervising five honours projects this year & have received quite a few emails late Saturday night & into the early morning – 03:30, with yet another batch between 08:00 and 10:00. They seem to have been quite for the afternoon so far. I have a few MSc’s who will be submitting reports on Tuesday, with some having already submitted this past Friday. Looks like next week is shaping up to be a series of Honours Project presentations, meetings & marking of about 250 courseworks. We will then be into exam season the following week.

I started blogging on Saturday 7th January this year with the first month varying between 100 to 200 views per week. This more or less doubled for the following two months, with the month of April generating the most views. As it presently stands, I have 265 Blog post followers, 19 comment, & 91 twitter followers, giving a total of 375 followers. There may of course be a little overlap between twitter and wordpress followers.

I posted my 1000th Tweet just a short while ago “The 1000th Tweet, Best of luck to all the @RGUComputing Honours Project Students who will be submitting their reports within the next 24hrs”, so this weekend has seen two milestones – 10,000 wordpress views & my 1000th tweet. This post will automatically be posted to twitter creating my 1001st post (or 9th if you think in binary). Views of my youtube channel are moving along as well, presently at 8,411 and 17 subscribers. Can’t really say how much of an influence / number of embedded plays I have received from the wordpress site.

My dive into the world of social media began with the setting up of a wordpress, twitter and youtube sites. Over the intervening 17 weeks I have gradually added other social media elements such as last.fm, klout, google+ and about.me about the only thing that is missing is a Facebook account!

Who knows what the forthcoming weeks and months will hold in store. What is the future of social media, will it become the main mode in which we communicate with students. It does certainly seem that they don’t read their email that much. I guess they prefer to opt for a more mobile means of keeping in touch.

I have seen many articles of late saying that the average attention span is about ten minutes. This is something I find quite strange as when I was in school the general norm for the duration of attention span was considered to be between 45mins and an hour, hence the holding of 45 minute classes in secondary school. Is this reduction of attention span an inherent component of the hyper-stimulated “digital age” in which we live.

As people become accustomed to multitasking – watching TV, while playing a game on a mobile / sending a text & studying on a laptop all concurrently, have we lost the ability to just sit down and concentrate on a single task for a substantial amount of time? From a health and safety view point its recommended to take a break from VDU work every ten minutes or so (I know many don’t actually do this), but is this perhaps adding to our shifting attentions.

Should we rethink the concept of the traditional one / two hour lecture. Do students more readily engage with videos than real people – as seems to be the case with the Kahn Academy – where people can pause, rewind, and replay segments of a lecture / tutorial and learn at their own pace. Is the future of learning self paced learning, and if so should we all become proficient video editors embracing youtube for the presentation of lectures and tutorials, make use of twitter to communicate with our students and use wordpress to bring it all together? What will the future years of the “digital age” bring especially in terms of education and engagement. One needs to just open the door and step through to see what’s on the other side.

Have added a few photographs to this post just for that extra splash of colour, enjoy.

Social Media Review after Eight Weeks

I entered the world of social media just eight weeks ago on the 7th Jan 2012 with this (
http://dcdoolan.wordpress.com/2012/01/07/hello-world/
) posting and the creation of a YouTube and twitter channel. So the question is – what are the stats like? has it generated impact?

At the time of writing this the blog has received 3115 views (wrote my 70th post yesterday) and presently stands at 100 followers. The followers break down as 78 from twitter (
https://twitter.com/dcdoolan
), 22 wordpress.com and 2 wordpress comment followers. The wordpress followers range from people in the States & Canada to here in the UK & Australia.

Twitter (having made 566 tweets) has certainly proven to be quite useful, allowing me to keep up-to-date with things many others are up to and news in general. Has also proved to be a useful aid in the organisation of some research seminars (
http://ideaseminars.wordpress.com
).

My YouTube channel (
http://www.youtube.com/user/dcdoolan/videos
)
presently stands at 5020 views & 15 subscribers. The most popular video so far has been of lightning recorded at Hogwarts Wizarding World, Universal Studios Orlando with 810 views (

). The next most popular is a video showing the Unboxing of a Cooler Master Cosmos II PC case with 296 views (

).  I recorded a video just a few weeks ago of the unboxing process & setup of one of the new MS Surface & uploaded it to the School Vimeo channel. It has proven to be quite popular amassing 5080 views in the three weeks since it was recorded (

).

My Klout score has move on up over the past few weeks as well, being just 20 back in January, it now stands at 34 (
http://klout.com/dcdoolan/
). All in all, the past eight weeks has been an interesting journey into the world of social media. It will be interesting to see how it will progress over the next few weeks and months.

The World of Social Media After 3 Weeks

Well it has been three weeks now since I created this blog, signed up for a twitter account & created a YouTube channel. On the YouTube side of things it will be three weeks tomorrow since I uploaded my first video. So the question is has it been worth it?

Early on this past week I visited two Secondary Schools to run some workshops on Building a PC and Computer Networking. I mentioned that I had recently entered the world of social media, and judging from a significant rise in YouTube channel views directly after I would guess that many of the students went and took a look. I had at that stage uploaded some videos showing the progress of the New Build at Garthdee (have also been able to share these updates with staff in the School of Computing), so they could get a sense of where they would be studying if they were to pursue the subject area of computing at Robert Gordon University. I also had some photographs of a computer museum + YouTube video of the NeXT cube (the type of machine used for the worlds first web server), so I would imagine that being able to see some images of such a machine is far more engaging that just reading about it from a textbook.

On that note I received a retweet from the Museum (Musée Informatique, in Paris) which I was really surprised about. This in turn lead to a retweet by Festival International de l’Audiovisuel & du Multimédia sur le Patrimoine. A Multimedia Festival being held in Montreal, Quebec 9th – 12th Oct 2012.

Another interesting thing that happened was that I received an email from a student in Marketing hoping to conduct a survey during one of my classes on how computing students go about purchasing their own personal computers. Having replied back I enquired as to why he had chosen to ask me this question. The answer that came back was mainly due to having an active social media presence – thereby giving the impression of being more approachable. Could it be that given the majority of our students are of the “Millennium Generation” i.e. have grown up fully immersed in the digital age that they inherently prefer to engage with Academics who readily make use of these social media channels.

Yesterday I hosted our first Research Seminar of 2012 having invited Dr. Judy Robertson and Mr Andrew MacVean from Heriot-Watt University to talk about the work they are doing  on Exergames. After the talk I searched on twitter and found that they both had accounts & thanked them for coming along and giving the talk. Quite a few speakers I had invited in the past year were also quite avid users of twitter and WordPress as well as several of the invited speakers due to give some talks in the coming months. The Principal of Robert Gordon University has been using WordPress and twitter for quite a few years now. From what I have seen over the past weeks there is certainly a growing trend of Academics readily embracing the world of social media. Not only should one have a presence in the lecture room or lab but also in the wider global community. Why should the sharing of knowledge be confined to just the lecture room or lab – people learn is so many different ways. With just a quick search on your favourite search engine you will find that many Academics are broadcasting tutorials and lectures on YouTube and other similar streams. Certainly the world is becoming a much smaller place, thanks to global communications and social media networks. Are  there only positives to be had by embracing social media? Are these forms of communication a useful source for CPD Continuing Personal Development – with the ever-increasing rate of change in the present modern world one must continually learn and embrace new things just to keep someway up-to-date with all the technological advances happening in the world around us, else get lost in a deluge of ever diversifying new gadgets. The digital age is well and truly here the only way forward is to fully embrace it (especially when one is working in the field of computing).

In this day and age particularly in the field of research the term “impact” crops up time after time. How is the proposed research going to impact the research community and the wider society. How can the results of the work be disseminated. Certainly there is something that can be said for how new results and knowledge can be shared to a wide audience through the means of social media in a near instantaneous fashion. My Influence (Klout Score) has increased from 20 to 29 in the past week since signing up less than a week ago. The publishing of conference papers and journal articles often means that work is 6 or even 18 months old before it is really shared, by this stage it may be considered old news! One has often hears the term “six degrees of separation” does this still hold true in the digital world of social media or has it brought us even closer together?

All in all I think it has been interesting to explore what is for me a new realm of the “Internet”. With the second semester of classes beginning on Monday it will be interesting to see how I may make use of these Social Media tools to more readily engage with the two hundred or so students I will be lecturing to over the coming twelve weeks. If I do make use of these tools in my teaching it is not just my students who will directly benefit, but also all those secondary school students who started following me on twitter, they can begin to get a sense that University is very much unlike Secondary School and of course anybody else following me or just happen across my channels. In summary, semester two should make for interesting times.