Classification of Blog

Classification system

Subject matter:

1) Politics

2) Fashion

3) Technology

4) Personal life

5) Law

6) History

Media type:

1) Vlog - Post made up entirely of video blog post.

2) Linklog - A website a blogger maintains a list of links and tagged for reference, in web log or blog format.

3) Sketchlog - Post made up of sketches.

4) Photo blogs - Most posts are photographs.

5) MP3 blog - Posts about music.

and so on.

Device:

Moblog - A combination of mobile and blog. Example: Twitter

The acceptance of readers for the blogger to blog about different topics blurred the circle of different types of blog communities. With that, readers have more variety of topics to read, and the circle of friends or acquaintance will widen via comments on the post.

Reference:

1) Ellis-Christensen, T., n.d., What is a Moblog? http://www.wisegeek.com/what-is-a-moblog.htm, viewed 8th May 2011.

2) Thegeminigeek.com, n.d., What is a Blog? http://www.thegeminigeek.com/what-is-a-blog/, viewed 8th May 2011.

Blogging as Current Phenomenon & Benefits to The Community

It was found in a research paper by Erik Elgersma and Maarten de Rijke that in recent years, the amount of blogs is estimated to have doubled approximately every half a year. It was cited in their paper that Technorati report that about 11% of net users are blog readers and 70,000 new blogs are seen created daily! It was also reported that the blogosphere amount is between 20 and 24 million blogs at time of writing. In other words, the number of blogs have, indeed, increased.

Below shows the image of web trends.

Figure 1.1: Trends in web

The thin red line represents blog trends. As you can see, the web has become something so complicated that a single simple chart to represent web trend couldn't be found.

Figure 1.2: Top 15 blogs and the trend in Malaysia

It appear that blogging has become more of a 'guy' thing. I'm not being sexist here, you can observe that the top 3 trends of blogs in Malaysia is of a personal trend, by the blogger Kenny Sia, Technology by the blogger Bryan and Humour by the blogger name Hemmy. I still remember back then when I was still in high school, blogs are girls stuff. We either blog about our daily lives, we also blog about fashion trends, so on.

In Malaysia, blogs became one of the loophole for the citizen to voice out freely. Of course, that is just the bright side of it. It became apparent that people blog about political topics because Malaysians do not have much choices when it comes to voicing out their opinion on topics like this. Websites like 'MalaysiaKini' is the best example to explain my point. It is one of the website that many visits to know the current update of politic in Malaysia.

Reference:

1) Dawson, R., 2007, The Trend for Trend Maps, http://rossdawsonblog.com/weblog/archives/2007/02/the_trend_for_t.html, viewed 7th May 2011.

2) Elgersma, E., Rijke, M.D., n.d., Learning to Recognize Blogs: A Preliminary Exploration, http://www.sics.se/jussi/newtext/working_notes/05_elgersma_derijke.pdf, viewed 7th May 2011.

3) Gaman, 2007, 50 Most Influential Blogs in Malaysia, http://www.sabahan.com/2007/02/06/50-most-influential-blogs-in-malaysia/, viewed 7th May 2011.

Blogging Communities

A blogging community is a community where your peers enjoy, agree and can relate to the same genre your blog posts are about (eHow, n.d.).

Here are the steps on building a blogging community.

Step #1: Blog hop around to get to know the blog genre that you enjoy.

Step #2: Be visible. Visit other blogs and leave a comment so that people can find you when you leave your URL behind.

Step #3: Write often so that those who follow the blog will have something to read to keep them entertain so that they will stay on your blog.

Step #4: Market your blog. Besides the strategy of visiting and commenting on other blogger's blog, here is an idea provided by eHow.com. Create a signature link to your blog on forums or message boards, another mini idea is that placing a signature link in your email signature can help, too.

Reminder:

1) Always make sure that your posts are entertaining. Come on, who wants to read uninteresting stuff? Not only will your readers stay on your blog longer, other new readers will be attracted, hence the community will be bigger.

There are three types of blogging community. The first type is Blogger Centric Community, it is a blog that is either owned by an individual blogger, or a group. The second type is Central Connecting Topic Community is a network formation that serve as a bridge that links bloggers and with a same passion or interest. The third type of blogging community is Boundaried Communities. It acts as a site where several hosts will act as an admin to the site and also has a collection of blogs. To be a part of the 'community', members can feel free to register, perhaps to receive regular updates notification and being able to leave a comment on the site. That way, readers can communicate and connect together. Global Voices is an example for Boundaried Communities because it is a site that has several bloggers acting as a host and has a variety of blogs collected.

Reference:

1) eHow, n.d., How to Build A Blogging Community, http://www.ehow.com/how_2152382_build-blogging-community.html, viewed 6th May 2011.

2) White, N, 2006, Blogs and Community: Lauching A New Paradigm For Online Community? http://kt.flexiblelearning.net.au/wp-content/uploads/2006/12/white.pdf, viewed 6th May 2011.

3) Globalvoices, n.d., Global Voices, http://globalvoicesonline.org/, viewed 6th May 2011.

New forms of media publishing

Nowadays, many turn towards Facebook or Twitter or Youtube for not only entertainment source, but also for news updates. People do not read newspaper like before, instead they turn to websites like 'The Star Online' or 'MalaysiaKini' for news update. Even Facebook status can be a news update! These statement are targeted on teenagers and also young adults. There are, however, adults who are 'converting' their source of entertainment and also news update to new media.

Not to mention that communication between people are so much more easier in comparison to the last century. Once you are online, you can chat via MSN, Facebook, emails and so on. Phones are getting more and more improved to the sense that there are phones who can replace a mini laptop because of it's high tech functions.

Walsh (2006) stated that 'affordances' of the words on the text is a form of communicating with the reader. What is 'affordance'? The definition of 'affordance' in the print-based texts is the narration or the 'telling' of the text to the reader. The difference of 'affordance' between old media and new media is as follows.

Figure 1.1: Table explains the differences between old media and new media in the angle of 'affordance'

The examples of 'multimodal' texts in non-print version are film, video, on-screen texts like emails and so on. The rising popularity of watching a video instead of reading a novel is proven to be true. It is terrifying to see that nowadays, kids turn to visual instead of print-based text. However, words are still needed to explain the idea to the reader/audience. As stated by Schriver (1997), 'Words and pictures that complement one another employ different visual and verbal content, and both modes are designed to work together in order to help the reader understand the same main idea.'

Reference:

1) Walsh, M. 2006,” ‘Textual shift’: Examining the reading process with print, visual and multimodal texts,” Australian Journal of Language and Literacy, vol.29, no.1, p.24-37. (UNISA electronic library)

2) Schriver, K.A. 1997, Chapter 6 in Dynamics in document design.

What is a good power point presentation?

Recently, I presented a group presentation about 'Seeing the text', a journal article written by Stephen A. Bernhardt. I left the classroom with disappointment at myself because I felt that I could have done much better. Sure, this presentation wasn't counted as a real presentation, but still...

Below is the screenshot of my point.

Figure 1.1: Slide#1 that explains about 'Four laws of Gestalt'

Figure 1.2: Slide #2 that explains about 'Four laws of Gestalt'

Figure 1.3: Fact sheet of Wetlands

Did you spot my mistake? No? Alright, scroll back up again and compare the figure 1.1 and 1.2. Did you see the error on my title of the slide? I've accidentally insert two different title on the same topic, which is the 'Four laws of Gestalt'. Such error is unacceptable as it may make the audience go, 'Huh? What was that?'

Moving on, yes, graphics do help in not only lightening the atmosphere of the presentation because the audience do not have to read words and words and words on the slide and then lost focus during the presentation (Marquez, 2011); however, it is essential to choose the right graphic to explain the point. For example, please scroll back up again to view the three figures above. Figure 1.1 and 1.2 shows the examples of 'Four laws of Gestalt', I've also inserted two tiny and cute little pictures to explain about the four laws. However, what I did did not help to explain my point because I did not relate to the fact sheet in Figure 1.3. Figure 1.3 is important because it is one of the best example to explain the four laws and it is already provided in the reading. To summarize my long-winded point, I went out of the topic.

To compliment myself, i can say that i have, indeed, did as instructed in the reading by Diana Reep (2006). She mentioned that white space creates a path that will lead the reader throughout the reading of the text. Besides that, Kress, G. & van Leeuwen, T. (2006) mentioned that image turns a boring text into a better record because people no longer read, they scan through the page, and image is able to explain or summarize the text.

Reference:

1) Marquez, Z.L., How to Make A Good Power Point Presentation, http://ezinearticles.com/?How-to-Make-a-Good-PowerPoint-Presentation&id=4313178, viewed 5th May 2011.

2) Kress, G. & van Leeuwen, T. 2006. Reading images. Chapter 1: The semiotic landscape: language and visual communication.

3) Reep, Diana C. 2006, ‘Chp 4: Principles of Document Design,’ in Technical Writing, 6th ed., Pearson Edu, Inc., New York, p.173-190.