Tuesday, November 11, 2008

The Blogging Phenomenon: Classifications & Communities

Dear readers,

There are many ways to classify a blog. You could classify them through the device used to create the blog: moblogs, for example, are blogs made through a mobile phone (Twitter being a popular moblog platform). You could classify them by the media used: vlogs, phlogs, tumblogs - video blogs, photo blogs and mixed-media blogs respectively. You could classify them by genre - technology, news, fashion, politics, hobbies.

Sites such as BlogCatalog and MyBlogLog are online communities devoted to blogging. On sites like these, people can be connected to blogs and bloggers to other bloggers (MyBlogLog). They are a cohesive of people interested in a common, unifying theme. Creating a blog community is a simple matter: all that is needed is links to other, similarly-themed blogs and a way to collect feedback for instance, a comment box. Ensure that you "foster discourse" (Kawasaki, 2006). Remember: publicity is everything (supra). A well-known community would be The Knowledge Tree, an "e-journal generated by members of the Australian vocational education and training (VET) system to enable the sharing of research and learning innovation in national and global e-learning" (About The Knowledge Tree, 2008). This community makes use of archives and RSS feeds to foster discourse.

(OnlineDatingMagazine.com, 2006.)

In A Taxonomy of Blogs (The Media Report: ABC Radio National); the author and analyst Margaret Simons attempts to dissect and define the different types of blogs that inhabit the World Wide Web. After reading the article, I felt that her classifications were far too inhibiting to be competently applied to today's blogosphere. She divides blogs into diaries, advertisements, pamphlets, news, gatewatchers, exhibitions, popular mechanics (i.e. How To's), digests, and advocacy blogs. While her categories were well thought out and concise, they did not fully encompass the scope of blogging today: is categorizing blogs even important (Chaney, 2005)? They could look at topic, style, format, or maybe their target audience. The most effective method would be to "categorize blogs by the type of content they consistently produce" (Rowse, 2008).

In my opinion, because blogs are part of Web 2.0, and not at all easy to categorize, readers must choose their own identification keys based on what they most need.

References

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Monday, November 10, 2008

The Blogging Phenomenon: Pitfalls & Benefits.

Dear readers,

Did you know that close to 113 million people own a blog, according to http://www.technorati.com/ (2008). There is an update posted every eight seconds. That's a lot of blogs.

Europe
Blogging remains relatively low on the to-do list, with a paltry four million active bloggers (Bouquet & Favier, 2006). However, these bloggers are "young, early adopters of new technologies" and therefore very attractive to marketers, being "more open-minded than the average online consumer" (Bouquet & Favier, 2006). European bloggers, according to Mackenzie (2006) gravitate towards everyday, journalistic blogs.

Asia
According to IT News Online (2006), nearly half of 'Net users in Asia own a blog. When broken down by gender, "fifty-five per cent of bloggers in Asia were found to be female and forty-five per cent male" (Jacques, 2006). As IT News states, blogs of interest are the most popular (with the exception of India, where business-themed blogs are most read).

Locally
Fifty-six per cent of Malaysian bloggers do so to express their opinions (Ooi, 2006). According to Gaman (2007), thirty-two per cent of the Malaysian blogosphere write about politics or technology. Another type of blog that is on the rise would be "boutique blogs", where people sell clothing, for examples, An Untitled Affair.

The Healing Power of Words
Blogging holds many benefits for the community. According to Wapner (2008), blogging holds "therapeutic effects". Research shows that writing about your experiences "improves memory and sleep, boosts immune cell activity and reduces viral load in AIDS patients, and even speeds healing after surgery". Blogging helps educate the public, being an invaluable tool of citizen journalism (Dvorak, 2002), which is when the public collect, report, analyze and disseminate news and information - highly fundamental in Malaysia, where freedom of the press is tenuous, at best.

References
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Sunday, November 9, 2008

My Reason For Being

Dear readers,

My name is IPD: The Whys and Wherefores. You may call me W2 for short. I inhabit a little corner of the World Wide Web. My address is http://www.pleaseletmepass.blogspot.com/. You probably know this because you are reading me.

By 'you', I refer to my target audience. You are document designers (professional or otherwise), fellow IPD students, seniors who are mocking me, juniors who are panicking because they procrastinated over Assignment 3.

And how exactly can I, a mere blog, help you? Kress & van Leeuwen (2006) say that I am an intricate "interplay of written text, imagers and other graphic/sound elements"; Walsh (2006) calls me a multimodal text that is "multi-linear and multi-directional". I will attempt to discuss and analyse different publication and design issues. I will review readings and put forth opinions/theoretical information (to the best of my abilities).

Please stay tuned. I assure you, I will supply you with a treasure-trove of academic... stuff.

References
  • Kress, G. & van Leeuwen, T. (2006). Reading Images: Grammar of Visual Design. Routledge: London.

  • Walsh, M. (2006). The ‘textual’ shift: Examining the reading process with print, visual and multimodal texts. The Australian Journal of Language and Literacy, Vol. 29, No. 1, pp24-37. UniSA Electronic Library.
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