The blogging process

When this assignment was given to us, I had to ask what a blog was. I had heard of the

m before, seen the sections at the bottom of news sites asking for reader comments, but I had never had a reason to know what a blog was and how to use one.

I would still only call myself a basic blogger, but I do like the idea of one day creating a 'popular mechanic blog', that is, a specialised blog about my occupation or hobby. The idea of creating a diary blog seems a little daunting, I can't quite imagine what encourages people to put all of their thoughts of the day online for anyone to see. At the same time it is exciting to know that your work is being put online for other people to see, but I can see the current issue with traditional journalism vs. amateur sources. It is so easy to create a blog, to write anything you want on it with hardly any responsibility for your own work, are we losing the credibility of a journalist to millions of blogger's who want their 15 minutes of fame?

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Blog classification

Probably the image that springs to mind when somebody mentions the word blog is of a somebody keeping a dear diary with the catch that the whole world can see it.

These types of blogs are the ones usually mentioned when people accuse the blog community of being a waste of time, so here is a list of different types of blogs, to allow you to be better informed when abusing or defending this community.

Pamphleteering blogs are sites by an individual or group of individuals to help push a cause. 

The digest blog acts as a guide or summary of media you can find elsewhere.

The advocacy blog is written by an established advocacy group or organisation and only concerns a single topic (these are much like pamphleteering blogs, although they usually deal with many different issues).

The popular mechanics blog is a blog that caters for special interests and needs, eg. fashion, cars or gardening.

The exhibition blog acts as just that; an exhibition. Usually run by artists to showcase their work and often their processes.

The gate watcher blog is written by experts of the field to ensure the right information is being put across.

The diary acts as a personal diary usually for friends and family. As written above these blogs are what people are usually referring to when they say blogging is rubbish.

The advertisement blog is just that, companies paying bloggers to advertise their products.

The news blog acts as an amateur journalism site, where people update the news as it happens, usually reporting a fuller story than the traditional media.


Source: Simons, M 2008, Towards a taxonomy of blogs, Australian Policy Online.
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Thrifty Decor Chick would be classified as a popular mechanics blog, that is, it is a specialised blog designed to benefit those interested in home and garden decor, although this blog does have sponsors who the blogger advertises for.

Total Sports Madness.com is much the same as Thrifty Decor Chick, that is it offers specialised information to those who are interested in it, in this case sporting fans.

Newspaper no more: the arrival of digital paper

Its been coming since 1999; the digital paper has now arrived, marking the end of hard copy newspaper as we know it. The date has been set for Australian; as of 2022 we will all be walking around with a flexible, lightweight A4 piece of plastic which can be erased, edited, updated,searched or formatted to read our newspapers.

Digital paper uses digital ink made up of millions of tiny beads suspended in a liquid carrier medium to make it look like proper ink. These beads rotate to show one side or the other when an electric field is applied,  therefore the page can be updated and reused countless times.

Seem a bit like the magical world of Harry Potter? These pieces of digital paper allow animations to be played out, and for your newspaper to be updated automatically. These sheets of plastic can run on simply a watch battery, as there is no need for power usage except when updating.

The arrival of digital paper will upset the world as we know it completely, but think of the possibilities. Updateable posters, restaurant menus and wallpaper. Or the best yet, no printing required for university work!


Newspaper extinction timeline

Sources:
Amjadali, S 1999, End of the paper trail, The Australian, 7 September.
Barker, G 2005, Flexible digital paper revolution hits city, The Age, 10 November.
Sinclair, L 2010, Deadline for newspapers as digital publications rise, The Australian, 1 November.
Wikipedia
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Online vs. Print

Designing for print is a completely different thing than designing for online viewing.

The first thing you need to realise when designing either viewing platform, is that the properties of the computer screen and paper are completely different. Looking at a computer screen is like looking at a projectors, and as you would probably know, this gets very tiring on the eyes. This means contrast will be more prominent than reading off of a piece of paper, therefore if you design something that involves a florescent background, or something along those lines, the viewer will be more accepting of this as a printed version rather than onscreen. Although a florescent background  on either platform probably wont win you to many points with your reader.

Online reading also means that the viewer cannot see the whole page they are looking at, as generally the screen will simply not allow it. This means it is harder to skim read an onscreen version than it is a printed document. Because of this, it is especially important to included headings, subheadings, page numbers, and headers and footers when designing for online viewing.

White space is a necessary part of any document, but particularly so if it is intended to be viewed online. This means you will need to be mindful of things like line length, line spacing, and paragraph spacing. This not only helps the reader out, it will allow you to draw more attention to things like headings.

As with both viewing types, there is a hierarchy used with typographic content:

• Titles should be larger and more noticeable than headlines.
• Headlines should be larger and more noticeable than subheadings.
• Level 1 subheadings should be larger and more noticeable than level 2 subheadings.

And so on.

When picking a font for online viewing, you must consider the first point of this article, that reading on a computer screen is harder for your reader's eyes than reading on paper. Sans-serif are usually the fonts most legible online, and you should avoid fonts that have extreme variations in their stroke thickness.

Colour is good in small doses, but use it with restraint. Large areas of colours, especially bright colours, are hard to look at, so keep usage to a minimum. The best way to make a good impression is by using black and a couple other colours. Also effective is using different shades of the one colour to highlight different areas of the page.

Remember KISS (keep it simple silly) will be your best friend when designing your document, and go with your own instinct. If you think something doesn't look right, chances are your reader will think the same thing!


Source: Parker, RC 2003, Looking good in print: designing documents for web distribution, Paraglyph Press, Arizona.
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What we don't know won't hurt us: the media's decision

What we know and what we don't know has always been for the media to decide, but not for long with the new popularity of citizen journalism and the internet. The public has always had to rely on the truthfulness of the journalist, their editor, and their newspaper's owner to deliver us the real story.

It's well known that we do not always receive the real story.

It seems that this is all behind us now, with the many citizen journalists on the internet having no restrictions to tell us the full story within minutes of it happening, before the media can even decide what angle they want, what spin to put on it, and what to conceal from the public.

As you can probably guess, there may also be a problem here: how do we know what we are hearing from these amateur sources is even right? Well we don't, but having them has increased the democracy within Australia, and it may even give the traditional media sources something to think about. If we as the public are hearing the full story anyway via the internet, they may as well publish the full story as well.

Source: Oehms, LR, The ugly truth about blatant media bias, The Australian, 25 August.

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Can you afford not to Facebook?

Small business might not be able to afford sitting by while social media takes the world by storm just because they are unsure of the benefit to them. Facebook has over 500 million members, and is an invaluable marketing tool, not only for achieving a two-way interaction between retailer and consumer, but also as a market research tool. Attracting friends and followers also gives your product great word of mouth advertising, which is not only cheaper, but will go further to convince a potential consumer.

Melbourne IT has found that small businesses who are using social networking are having more success online than those who are not, and a recent survey of 3400 small businesses on how they use the internet for business, a third used social media, in particular Facebook and Twitter. The executive general manager of Melbourne IT Damon Fieldgate has added that using social media gives a business another channel to communicate and interact with their consumers.

With these kind of statistics I can see the need for small businesses to get on the bandwagon; I used to think it was a bit silly businesses having Facebook accounts, thinking it was meant to be more of a personal networking site. Seeing so many businesses online now though, it has become the norm to be getting requests from businesses to 'like' their pages.


Source: Kaplan, M 2010, All that Twitters turns to gold, The Australian 27 August.
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Tablets are taking over for Murdoch

Rupert Murdoch has announced that he has the right idea by charging subscriptions for online viewing of The Times of London, and that The Australian will be following suit on the back of the iPad revolution.

Murdoch has estimated Apple will sell around 15 million iPads this year, and over 40 million by 2012, giving him the ‘perfect platform’ to launch his new ‘freemium’ model. The 'freemium' model is similar to that used by The Wall Street Journal, where users can only access premium content by subscribing to the newspaper. In the first month The Australian was available as an iPad app it saw 8500 people paying $4.99 each to subscribe, and with news that people are spending twice as long on the iPad app then on The Australian website, this number will be sure to rise.


Murdoch’s News Corporation has already had an overwhelming audience on The Wall Street Journal, The Times of London, and The Australian iPad apps.

While I’m still a believer that news should be free, I guess I will have to contend with free to air television instead. Murdoch believes that this is the way to go in order to recover the investment they have made in journalism, which makes perfect sense. Why should we get to access the news for free, employees have to get paid somehow.

Source: Sinclair, L 2010, 'Murdoch takes a page out of The Times' net subscription,' The Australian, 4 August.
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