A7's blogicons - memory assignment #2

Hi,

The first thing that came to mind when thinking of the initial memory assignment was a blog. It seems fairly logical to me that an amnesic would benefit greatly by using a blog. It's essentially the same thing as using a calendar, a contact list, and a personal journal of events, all rolled into one. But since I've done the "blog thing" enough already, I wanted to explore a different path for the main project. Lucky for me though, the blog idea fits nicely with the "emoticon" type of project.

While designing a visual icon based category feature for another blog, it occured to me that the same concept (posting in categories) can be applied to emotions. I thought it could be an interesting concept to be able to "post by mood" in a blog. So, when you are creating your post, you select an emotion that is associated with the post you are typing. For example, if I am talking about how I really loved having friends over for dinner, I would select the "love" or "happy" emotion during the post creation. Then, once the post is created, I can easily have an emoticon display of the emotion I chose, right at the head of the post. This makes the blog more interesting to read (more visual) and even allows me to sort posts by emotion. For example, if I feel like reading only posts in which I was very happy, I simply select that category from the list, and all those posts come up, in essence hiding all the other emotions.

I implemented this into my own blog, to see how well it would work. It certainly adds a nice visual touch, and I find myself recalling the memory more vividly when I see the emotion I attached.

You can view the blog in person here: http://www.bya7.com

The way I implemented it in my blog was simply to use pre-built sets of icons that are freely available on the internet. That way people can choose emoticon that they feel best represent their feelings. Here are some other examples of icon sets that could be used: