Good design for screen genre

Reep (2006) said that readers do not read only the printed words on a page but they also read the visual presentation of the text. As you can see in the slide below, the use of the red colored fonts against a yellow background are meant to attract the viewer's attention to the tittle of the presentation. The accompanying visuals in the slide serves the Salience theory proposed by Kress & van Leeuwen (2006) which is to grab viewers’ attention by providing aesthetics and meaning.

The second slide above justifies what Bernhardt (1986) mentioned about the physical fact of the text that requires visual apprehension. He said that the process in entirely different from the perception of speech as a text should be seen and must be seen instead of spoken and heard. He also said that the presentation of the text determines the tone of the message.

On the third slide above, despite what has been said by Kress & Van Leeuwen (2006) about how writing does not determine the absolute meaning of text anymore, text are still used to explain the meaning of the visual display to the audience. This slide is embedded with a series of animated texts that explains the visual elements of the mentioned document design.

References:

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

2. Kress, G. & van Leeuwen, T. 2006. Reading Images, Chapter 6: The meaning of composition.

3. Bernhardt, Stephen A. (1986), College Composition and Communication, Vol. 37, No. 1 (Feb., 1986), pp. 66-78, National Council of Teachers of English.

New forms of media publishing

(Source: Cohesion.rice.edu)

It is hard to argue the fact that the newest form of media publishing that is spreading like wildfire is none other than Twitter.

Twitter have popularized the term microblogging, which differs from traditional blogging in terms of content. Twitter entries (known as 'tweets') are purely text-based entries in no more than 140 characters that also enables embeddings of URLs, photos & video links.

Twitter has changed how fast and concise news and information are being disseminated to the mass Internet audience. The recent Haiti earthquake serves as a good example of the Twitter effect. Twitter users received instant updates about the natural disaster way ahead of major news networks thus Public figures have also adopted the Twitter technology in their lives as it offers their followers more current updates in their daily activities giving them an intimate experience with them.

In Malaysia, Twitter has really caught on to a majority of Malaysians. The political climate in Malaysia has changed drastically with the advent of Twitter. A majority of politicians have their own Twitter accounts where they share their views, activities and happenings with the general public as frequent as possible. They are also able to receive instant feedbacks from their followers.

For me personally, following Twitter accounts of several politicians from different parties gives me instant updates about the happenings of the Hulu Selangor by-election that is coming up on 25 April 2010. I am also able to view their personal insights regarding the whole campaign; something that newspapers and TV news are not able to provide me with.

Reference:

1. Naughton, J. (2006), Blogging and the emerging media ecosystem, online, retrieved 12 April 2010, from http://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/fileadmin/documents/discussion/blogging.pdf

Types, methods to build and structure of blogging communities

To define what is a blogging community, we must first look at what is an online community. As explained by Nancy White (Blogs and Community - launching a new paradigm for online community? 2006), an online community is a community that relies on online interaction within some bounded set of technologies. During the early mass acceptance of the internet technology, these online communities interacted via bulletin board systems, forums and even as simple as emails. The rapid advent of blogs has instantly caused peo

ple to adopt it as a more personalized vessel to convey their thoughts better than bulletin boards or forums. It is safe to say that the blogging community evolved from the earlier online community.

White (Blogs and Community - launching a new paradigm for online community? 2006) also stated that it is the use of Web 2.0 tools such as RSS, permalink, tagging which allowed bloggers to comment on each others blogs are largely responsible in the creation process of a blogging community. These tools are used as a native communication tool for bloggers amongst one another which allowed community-like interactions.

According to White (Blogs and Community - launching a new paradigm for online community? 2006), there are 3 basic types of blogging communities that can be easily understood by observing the diagrams below. They are:

(Source: Tihane 2006)

1. Single Blog/Blogger Centric Community (Involves not only the blogger but also the community of commentors)

(Source: Tihane 2006)

2. Central Connecting Topic Community (A community that arises between blogs linked by a common passion)

(Source: Tihane 2006)

3. Boundaried Communities (Collection of blogs and blog readers hosted on a single site or platform)

If we take a look the structure of Nuffnang, it's interesting that White (Blogs and Community - launching a new paradigm for online community? 2006) mentioned about hybrid types. Nuffnang is Asia's first and leading advertising community that provides a platform that allows advertisers to place their adverts on almost all blogs hosted on an array of platforms. This type of blogging community is very closely linked to that of the Central Connecting Topic Community where everyone is bounded by a common passion.

References:

1. Blogs and Community - launching a new paradigm for online community?, podcast radio programme, September 2006, Australian Flexible Learning Framework, retrieved 11 April 2010, from http://kt.flexiblelearning.net.au/tkt2006/edition-11-editorial/blogs-and-community-–-launching-a-new-paradigm-for-online-community.

2. 3 blog community paradigms, 24 December 2006, Taming the spaces blog, online, retrieved 11 April 2010, from http://tihane.wordpress.com/2006/12/24/3-blog-community-paradigms/

3. nuffnang - About Us, online, retrieved 11 April 2010, from http://www.nuffnang.com.my/about-us/

Classification of blogs

For this post, I have found a unique blog classification system. Qu et al. (2006) designed an experiment based on natural language processing (NLP). NLP is a field of computer science and linguistics concerned with the interactions between computers and human (natural) languages that converts information from computer databases into readable human language (Wikipedia 2001). Their NLP program is used for categorizing one hundred and twenty blogs into four topic groups: personal diary, politics, news, and sports.

The NLP experiment was carried out by weighing specific linguistic features such as the title of individual blog entries and the anchor text from incoming links will make the classification algorithm even more accurate. They explained further that even if blogs are hardly distinguishable because of the nature of bloggers that blog about whatever they feel like to, they were aiming for the NLP techniques to explore the feasibility of automatic blog classification.

If the NLP approach done by Qu et al. (2006) seemed a bit technical, Simmons (2008) offered a more defined classification of blogs by categorizing them into Pamphleteering blogs, Digest blogs, Advocacy blogs, Popular Mechanics blogs, Exhibition blogs, Gatewatcher blogs, Diary blogs, Advertisement blogs and News blog. The NLP approach takes into consideration of titles of blog entries and the anchor text whereas Simmons' categorization looks into the blog's nature as a whole allowing her to name the categories as such.

In my opinion, the NLP approach might provide us with a more mathematically accurate result in blog classification but to truly justify a blog type one must personally define what the blog is all about by reading through it and understanding the blog's intention.

References:

1. Qu, H., La Pietra, A. & Poon, S (2006), Classifying Blogs Using NLP: Challenges and Pitfalls,University of California at Berkeley, School of Information Management & Systems

2. Wikipedia 2oo1, Natural language processing, online, retrieved 10 April 2010, from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_language_processing

3. A taxonomy of blogs (2008), online, retrieved 7 April 2010, from http://www.abc.net.au/rn/mediareport/stories/2008/2372882.htm#transcript.

Blog as current phenomenon & benefits to the community

If we are to look at the size of the blogosphere today, we must first look into demographics. Based on Matt Sussman's (2009) article, two-thirds of the majority and 60% of the overall blogging population are between the ages of 18-44.

According to Funnel (2008), the trend in Asia is that a massive majority are below the age of 35. This is a stark contrast to that of Europe and U.S where the majority of their bloggers are over the age of 35.

The current blogging trend in Malaysia as we can see are divided in 2 segmentations. As we can observe on the basis national-importance, more and more blogs are deeply rooted in political matters. This happens prior and after the Malaysia's 12th General Election. Politicians and political analyst alike are making full use of blogs and its tool to spread their cause and are also turning their blogs into a place where they can gain feedback from the general public.

The second blogging trend that has hit Malaysia recently is aptly called blogshopping. This is where a number of individuals who set up blogs to sell stuff. Blog shops are still gaining popularity amongst youths and adults alike. Unlike online shopping, blogshopping is deemed to be much more personal as potential buyers are interacting directly with the business owner online. This online trend also translates well in the real world as these blog shop owners are often seen participating in clothing bazaars every now and then, making the shopping experience online and in the real world to be convenient and intimate at the same time.

References:

1. Sussman, M (2009), Day 1: Who Are The Bloggers? SOTB (2009), online, retrieved 7 April 2010, from http://technorati.com/blogging/article/day-1-who-are-the-bloggers1/.

2. A taxonomy of blogs (2008), online, retrieved 7 April 2010, from http://www.abc.net.au/rn/mediareport/stories/2008/2372882.htm#transcript.

3. Blog Shopping Trend (2010), online, retrieved 7 April 2010, from http://blogshop.my/blog-shop/blog-shopping-trend.html

Purpose & Intent

The purpose of blog is to have a documented discussion or argument regarding certain issues in the publication field. Considering my target audience that are made up of my COMM 1043 lecturer and classmates, I find this issue to be very beneficial for our course of study. At the end of this weblog I hope my target audience and myself will be more aware of the impact and future the publication industry