Monday, April 19, 2010

The Blogging Communities

What is blogging community?
Blogging means write something online in a blog that you want to share with the publics.Community referred to those people who shared the same area of interests. Thus, blogging communities are those people or bloggers who have the same interest in a particular area and they discuss together in a group or in this case, in a blog.


How to create a blogging community?
1. Choose a central gathering place (Bensen, 2009). According to Rowse (2009), comments section in the blog is a good and natural place to start to build the 'community'. Ask questions in the posts and try to interact with the readers.

2. Set up web analytics on the blog. For example, plug in google analytics (Bensen, 2009).

3. Start to find out who and where your potential readers are at (Bensen, 2009). Setting up Google Alerts on your blog will helps to determine who is your targeted readers.

4. Update your blog frequently and regularly to maintain you readers' interest. Use hyperlinks, forum, tag, links, chat space and comment post to allow the readers to be interactive with the blog they are reading. It also attract more readers to subscribe and link to your blog to maintain the readership.

5. Participate in specific social networking and get involved in it. Try to develop relationships with others and meet as many people as possible (Bensen, 2009).

Types of Blogging communities
According to Nancy White (2006), blogging communities show up in three main patterns:
  • Single Blog/ Blogger Centric Community
  • Central Connecting Topic Community
  • Boundaried Community

Global Voices is one of the online communities. This online community falls into the Central Connecting Topic Community where it used technology to create an experience of a shared community. Global Voices Community aggregates blogs from developing nations in an effort to get the mainstream media to pay attention to the issues in those countries (White, 2006). Bloggers in Global Voices Community still have and maintain their own blogs. They group together in one community and supporting each other and basically learning from each other. 




References:


    Posted by Joanne Choo at 9:17 PM 0 comments

    Classification of blogs

    Blogs are created with the mixture of various styles and people often find it hard to see what interest them as everything is mixed up together. Contents in a blog are the most important elements in classifying a blog (Miller & Shepherd, 2004). However, it is very hard to classify blogs based on its contents as contents on the blogs are not always the same.

    Blogs nowadays being classified based on few genres.
    (a) Subject Matter
    Personal Blog
    (Source: Xia Xue 2010)

    Political Blog
    (Source: Anwar Ibrahim 2010)

    Fashion Blog
    (Source: Shirts4Real 2008)

    (b) Device
    Moblog (Mobile Blogging)
    Mobile phones act as another device to publish blog entries.
    (Source: Google 2010)

    (c) Media Type
    Sketch Blog
    A blog consists of images, especially sketches and other drawings.
    (Source: Rob-Sheridan 2010)

    (d) Status of publisher
    Business Blog
    A blog to promotes the company itself.
    (Source: Smart Usaha 2010)

    According to Marget Simons (2008), blogs are classified into 9 categories which are pamphlettering blogs, digest blogs, advocacy blogs, popular mechanics blogs, exhibition blogs, gatewatcher blogs, diary blogs, advertisement blogs and news blogs. The diary blogs and advertisement blogs are similar to the subject matter category. Diary blogs and personal blogs are those blogs that intended for the friends and family of individuals. They contain news, photos and information of a largerly personal kind. As for the advertisement blogs, companies are paying established bloggers undisclosed kickbacks to booths their products.

    Pamphlettering Blog
    A blog where individual or groups of people argue a case.
    (Source: Catalaxy 2010)


    Digest Blog
    These act primarily as guides and summaries to things you can access else where.
    (Source: FairGoFairFax 2008)


    Exhibition Blog
    Blogs maintained by writers, craftspeople, artists and artisans of many kind in which they bring their creations to a wider audience, and sometimes discuss their methods and thought processes.
    (Source: AroundtheWorldIn20Quilts 2010)


    In my opinion, I prefer to classify blogs by using subject matter. This method makes it easier for people to go to a particular blogs to look for the exact information that they want as this classified blogs withe their genre. For example, we just need to type 'fashion blogs' in Google search and a list of the fashion blogs will appeared in the screen. Besides that, this classification of blogs also make it easier for those bloggers to reach out to their targeted audience.



    References:


      Posted by Joanne Choo at 12:53 PM 0 comments

      New blogging trend

      A blog is also called as web logs or weblogs. It is a publication of personal thoughts, ideas or journals and web links that allow people to share with others (Marketing.com, 2010). A blogs is also similar to a personal online diary. It is a mixture of what is happening in a person's life, and what is happening in on the web or in the society (Marketing.com, 2010). In the year 1997, John Barger named 'weblog' as the new form of websites that are usually operated by one person and update with regular entries of any topic that the person wants to share with others (Blood, 2000).

      According to Master New Media (2007), the blogsphere nowadays is 70 million weblogs wide. About 120,000 new blogs are created each day and around 1.5 million posts are posted each day. The result of the survey also shows that 1.4 new blogs are created every second and 17 posts are made every second. It took 320 days to grow from 35 to 75 million blogs.

      People often blog for expressing their feelings as well as sharing their thoughts or views with the rest. Besides that, there are also many blogs are created for business, travel and politics purposes. The blogging trend in Malaysia is different from the Europe's blogging trend. Blogs are normally used on topic such as business and travelling in Europe while Malaysia's blogging trend focus more on personal and political purposes (Best European Blog, 2007). 

      Example of Political Blog
      (Source: Anwar Ibrahim 2009)

      Example of Personal Blog
      (Source:Esther Wee 2010)

      With the existence of blogs nowadays, many people had switched from mainstream media to online blogs for alternative news. For example, political blogs in Malaysia provides alternative news to the people in the country and encourage them to participate in the political discussion. The political blogs promotes participation of people in debating political issues which in turn promotes democrary in people (Lievrouw et. al, 2006).
      Conclusion, it can't be deny that blogs are now part of the new generation media and they have wielded great influence and swayed the thinking among the Malaysians. Blogs are growing in a very fast pace in the society as it provides people a change to express themselves by blogging whatever they want to.


      References:
      Posted by Joanne Choo at 3:14 AM 0 comments

      Saturday, April 10, 2010

      Introduction

      This blog is created for my course subject "Introduction to Publication and Design" (IPD) assignment 3.

      The purpose of this blog is to discuss about topics related to publication and designing, as well as for me to understand more about the particular topic that being taught in class. Targeted audience of this blog will be students who want to know more about good publication and designs.

      Posted by Joanne Choo at 11:46 PM 0 comments