I made two pages with images of some of my students' artwork. There are about 100 other artworks I want to add but they are all on my office comp so they will have to wait till next week.

3D Graphic Design-

2D Graphics Design -

(e:scud) , if you read this I need your dragon and still frames from your capstone.

(e:dan,73) Dan the sidekick doesn't have bluetooth or video. Maybe it is a hoax.

It was freakin' lame, in fact I am embarrassed to be recording it here. (e:rachel) was sick, late, and tired. (e:drchlorine) showed up with his new girl, who is (e:rachel) 's boss or something (she was pretty cool), and left early. (e:soyeon) refused to go because of a misunderstanding. (e:mike) was at rent, (e:dan) at a poker game, (e:lilho) and (e:flacidness) were sick. So none of their gangs showed up either and (e:ajay) drank at home. Basically, (e:matthew) , (e:terry) and I could have just drank in the mansion and had (e:rachel) and (e:drchlorine) stop by.

Apparently, taking the highway to school is not a shortcut but a giant circle. I guess I knew that but this map makes it ever more obvious.

Missing Image ;(

Elmwoodstrip.org is a community dataspace based in the elmwood strip community of Buffalo, NY. This digital public space brings local residents together by allowing them to digitally share and embed their local experience within the data structures of the site.

Elmwoodstrip. org recreates a public sphere in a place where public meeting places have been largely commodified (e.g. Spot Coffee), by providing a cost free place to exchange ideas. By using open source software in the programming and design of the site, I have been able to keep the cost at such a minimum as to provide this service free of charge to the public within this community. There are currently there are about 200 users and hundreds of local readers with a daily data consumption of about 200-500MB shared between around 200 unique visitors/day.

Users can embed text, sound, animation, and video without any previous web programming experience and without the use of any expensive proprietary or commercial software. After a user finishes click-publishing their media, the embedded data becomes immediately available to the public via the elmwoodstrip.com interface.

By lowering the learning curve for publication to the web, and tying the publication process in with a dedicated local readership, elmwoodstrip.org opens up this digital documentation process to a segment of the population that typically does not produce their own media or record their own historical experience. As with swatches in a quilt, the embedded media files are "sewn" together using MySQL, an open source database software package, and delivered to the public with PHP, another open source scripting language, to form a digital quilt of the elmwood experience from 2003-2005.

Elmwoodstrip. org is intended to counteract the negative effects on local community that have resulted from globalized communication on the internet by creating an immersive local web experience. Time spent at the site focuses the residents on communicating with each other and revitalizes the sense of local community. As the project site continues to grow, a people's history of this community begins to emerge and the interpretation of the local experience becomes more colorful and accurate.

Elmwoodstrip.org is based on open standards technologies such as HTML, CSS, Javascript, PHP, MySQL, RSS, and XML. User to user communication is handled via journals, cell phone SMS messages, site posts, integrated AOL AIM, integrated yahoo YIM, and email. Users can view the site from computer web browsers and even read the site, post and receive reader feedback from their mobile phones.

Although all users are essentially writing public journals, reader initiated comments are allowed only on the readers journals, as to promote a sense of responsibility when interacting with other users. By creating a method for inlinking between the writers and the readers journals, other readers can follow along the logical path of a discussion while avoiding the problem of spam that plagues many other online forums and journaling sites.

In the written segment of my thesis I will be exploring necessary technical and developmental decisions in the construction of such a data intensive and highly interactive web site, as well as, addressing issues of privacy, security, and public image in relation to elmwoodstrip.org and its users. Furthermore, I will be investigating and contrasting elmwoodstrip.org to other online communities that focus on the interaction of local residents such as the famous WELL online community in San Francisco, Craig's List, and others.