Blogging Issues

a. Blogs as current phenomenon and benefits of blogging to the community

Blogging is now a common everyday thing and it has grown a lot since it was first introduced. Technorati tracked over 70 million weblogs and about 120, 000 weblogs being created worldwide everyday in year 2007 (sifry.com, 2007) and in 2008, 133 millio
n blog records indexed by them since year 2002. (Technorati.com, 2008)
The trends of blogging in different country varies. In a survey, it is stated that Asian bloggers tend to be more motivational and confessional whereas European bloggers tend to be more confrontational. (Technorati.com 2008)
Techorati.com suggested that politics is unpopular but music is more popular in Asia, while personal, lifestyle, and religious topics are less popular in Europe. There are many benefits of blogs to the community in various aspects.
In my point of view, blogs are a part of a social networking online where people get to share their thoughts, interested and etc, helps to promote business as well as advertising because people now sell things online by showcasing their products on their weblog and lastly, self-promoting politics welfare on blogs are also one of the most common and easy way for Politicians to get connected to the nation.

References:
Sifry, D. 2007, The State of the Live Web- April 2007, Sifry's Alert, viewed on 18 November 2009,

White, D. 2008, Day 2: The what and why of blogging, Technorati State of the Blogosphere 2008, viewed on 18 November 2009,

Winn, P. 2008, State of the Blogosphere: Introduction, Technorati State of the Blogosphere 2008, viewed on 18 November 2009,

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b. Classification of blogs & opinion about the most appropriate classification approach
Types of classification:

Subject Matter:

• politics
• fashion
• food
• music
  
• travel
• history
• law
  
• business
• technology
• sports

Media types:

• vlog (a video form of blog. very common on You Tube)
• linklog (a blog that consist links to other blogs such as iamcal)
  
• sketchlog (a blog that consist more on images and sketches such as rob-sheridan)
  
• tumblelog (a blog that consist very short but consise post such as projectionist)
• photolog (a blog that showcases photos rather than posting text such as flickr)

State of publisher: business and corporate blogs.

Device: moblog (a short form for mobile blogging. Example of moblog)

Based on Media Report - A taxanomy of blogs 2008, Simons mentioned a few kinds of blogs as well.

• Pamphleteering blogs or also known as politic blogs
• Digest blogs.
  
• Advocacy blog.
• Popular Mechanics blog or known as How-To blog.
• Exhibition bloge.
• Gatewatcher blog.
• The Diary blog.
• The Advertisement blog.
• News blog.

Based on the two sources, both the categories classified are different in a sense that the first source classify blog by its functionality whereas the second source classify by its content. In my opinion, it is hard to classify blogs in a standardized motion as new type of blogs evolved from time to time and people tend to get confused with some many functionality all in on. Videos can be embedded into blogs, music and photos can be added as well so what kind of blog would you call that? However, it is good to classify these blogs as it helps us clarify its function and content.


Reference:
Funnell, A. 2008, A taxanomy of blog, The Media Report, viewed on 18 November 2009,

David, T. 2008, The 8 different types of blogging in 2008, MakeYouGoHmm .com, viewed on 18 November 2009, >

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c. Explain briefly types of blogging communities & methods to build blogging communities. Then, discuss the structure of one blogging community in brief, eg. Global Voices.

A blogging community is a group of people connected to each other via blogs and all of them share the same interest.

"Discussion builds community." Mueller, 2009.

There are a few ways to create a blogging community. For instance;
1. Get Personal! Take time to reply to the comments people left on your blog to establish network and from there, you already have a network with someone. (Mueller, 2009)
2. Try join an online community group or ask readers to subscribe to your blog. Keeping in touch within your community helps and also try to be active in activities organized in the group. (Rowse, 2009)

Speaking of blogging communities, there are tons and tons of it where you can find from. One of the examples would be Global Voices Online.

(Source: Globalvoicesonline.org)

Global Voices is a blogging community where more than 200 bloggers post about media reports and opinions and it is translated into different languages in different countries. (Globalvoicesonline.org) In this community, bloggers from different countries come together on this site to discuss about issues concerned about such as freedom of expression, citizen journalism and other types of self expression.

References:
Global Voice Online 2009: About Us, viewed on 18 November 2009,

Mueller, E 2009, How to create a community on for your blog for Wordpress users, viewed on 18 November 2009,

Rowse, D 2009, 8 Tips for Building Community on Your Blog, viewed on 18 November 2009, >
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d. Designing for print versus designing for online

(Source: http://communicate--this.blogspot.com/2008_11_01_archive.html)

(Source: http://limaymay.blogspot.com)

The following images are examples of a newspaper print and a blog layout.
For the first image, it is the front cover of The Star Newspaper and as you can see, there are images and captions as well as subheadings. They help to guide readers by directing their attention to the highlighted headings or pictures of that particular topic. (Reep, 2006)

As for the blog layout, it is more of a casual form where images and text are alligned to one side. The only advantage of the blog is that, it is a multimodal media where videos from You Tube can be embedded to the site unlike printed papers. It also have links that will bring us to another website. Multimodal text are text that has more than one element (Walsh, 2006)

According to Dr. Roswell (2006), students navigate through printed and multimodal text such as websites differently as the purpose and the context itself is different. To summarize it, each of the examples given above have its own design served for its own purpose.


References:
Reep, DC 2006, 'Document Design', in Technical Writing, 6th edn, Pearson, New York, pp.133-172.

Roswell, J. 2006, Documenting Multimodal Literacies, viewed on 18 November 2009,

Walsh, M 2006, "Textual Shift: Examining the reading process with print, visual and multimodal texts," Australian Journal of Language and Literacies, vol. 29, no. 1, p. 24-37.
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e. New forms of media publishing

Right now there are many different form of media publishing to choose from. We have Twitter, Facebook, You Tube, forums and more to name. Many people use these channels for leisure however some used it for professional purpose. Communication and journalism are now taking place in these media forms as it is an 'in' trend.

Take twitter for example, journalist are using Twitter as a medium to post their journals however the word limitation does not stop them from posting. They decided to come up with a question to start a discussion online. (Betancourt, 2009)

(Sources: http://mashable.com/2009/05/14/twitter-journalism/)

As you can see, there is a whole long list of journalist enlisted on twitter and it seems like journalism has taken its step to a whole new level rather than writing articles in an old fashion way.

Even The Star Newspaper, a local Malaysian newspaper has a Tweeter account!


References:
Betancourt, L. 2009, The Journalist Guide to Twitter, viewed on 18 November 2009,

The Staronline.TV, Twitter.com, viewed on 18 November 2009,