Reflection

Blogging as a form of media has to be taken seriously because as you publish any publication on the internet, the entire world can axcess to it. Blogging can be a powerful tool, depends on one's intention, it can creates wonderful greatness as well as massive damages.

• 'The Internet is a multimodal environment with plenty of modes' (Kress and van Leeuwen 1998)
• 'Every mode has its own affordance due to the modes' special features' (Schriver 1997)
• 'Context of culture is necessary for a text to be fully understood' (Hallidays 1985)

Users should apprieciate the invention of this technology and take this tool as a pathway to better mankind.
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References:

eBlogger, 'Is spam permitted on Blogger?', Blogger.com, viewed on 2 May 2008, <http://help.blogger.com/bin/answer.py?answer=42577#whatwedo>

Halliday, M & Hasan R 1985, Language, context and text: aspects of language in a social-semiotic perspective, Deakin University, Victoria.

Jensen, M 2003, Emerging alternatives: a brief history of weblogs, Columbia Journalism Review, viewed 27 October 2007, < http://cjrarchives.org/issues/2003/5/blog-jensen.asp>

Kenny, S 2008, 'kennyasia.com: when routine isn't exactly normal', viewed on 2 May 2008, <http://kennysia.com/>

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

Kress, G & van Leeuwen, T 1998, ‘Front pages: (the critical) analysis of newspaper layout’, in Bell, A & Garrett, P (eds) 1998, Approaches to media discourse, Blackwell, Oxford, chapter 7, pp. 186-219.

Mahmud, S 2006, 'Politics/ Technology: The Persian blogosphere', Wanabehuman: Virture is knowledge, viewed on 2 May 2008, <http://wanabehuman.blogspot.com/2006/04/politicstechnology-persian-blogosphere.html>

Mahmud, S, 2006, 'Politics/ Technology: The Chinese blogosphere', Wanabehuman: Virture is knowledge, viewed on 2 May 2008, <http://wanabehuman.blogspot.com/2006/04/politicstechnology-chinese-blogosphere.html>

Malaysia Central, The Leading Malaysia-Centric Info Portal & The Most Comprehensive Malaysian Search Directory, viewed on 2 May 2008, <http://www.mycen.com.my/malaysia/blog.html>

Morton, GR 2002, 'The Imminent Demise of Evolution: The Longest Running Falsehood in Creationism', viewed on 2 May 2008, <http://home.entouch.net/dmd/moreandmore.htm>

Nielsen, J 1997, 'Be Succinct!! (Writing for the Web), Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox, viewed on 2 May 2008, <http://www.useit.com/alertbox/9703b.html>

Nielsen, J 2006, 'F-shaped Pattern For Reading Web Content', Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox, viewed on 2 May 2008, <http://www.useit.com/alertbox/reading_pattern.html>

Nuffnang Malaysia, Asia's First Blog Advertising Community, viewed on 2 May 2008, <http://www.nuffnang.com.my/>

Reep, DC 2006, Technical Writing, 6th edn, Pearson Longman, NY.

Schriver, KA 1997, Dynamics in document design: creating texts for readers, Wiley Computer Pub., NY.

Technorati, About us: Welcome to Techonorati, Technorati.com, viewed on 2 May 2008, <http://technorati.com/about/>

The Star Online, 22 March 2008, 'Shabery to hear out bloggers', The Star Online, viewed on 2 May 2008, <http://thestar.com.my/news/story.asp?file=/2008/3/22/nation/20725852&sec=nation>

The Star Online, viewed on 2 May 2008, <http://www.thestar.com.my/>

Walsh, M 2006, ‘“Textual shift”: examining the reading process with print, visual and multimodal texts', Australian journal of language and literacy, Vol. 29, No. 1, pp. 24-37.

Wilson, G 2006, Down with blogs, so here’s another, BBC News, viewed 26 October 2007, < http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/5116654.stm>

YouTube Company History, YouTube: Broadcast Yourself, viewed on 2 May 2008, <http://youtube.com/t/about>

New Publishing Media

The trend of blogging is now getting more and more popular. Years before blog was popular, people find it hard to find to voice out their opinion to the government or to the mass public. Main stream media was the only place the citizens can do so, not many had succeeded. The main stream media will always have a bar to follow, which certain issue which are consider sensitive will not be published in the daily news letter nor broadcast in the television and radio. Censorship and policies basically silences anyone from saying things that are against the people in power. People had less freedom of speech back then compare to now, thanks to the invention of internet, now everyone can board cast on themselves.

For example the launch of YouTube website, which now own by Google Inc., has created an extraordinary frenzy throughout the world. Almost all net users at least visited YouTube website for once. It is a website that allows registered users to upload video to the internet and share their video with anyone by internet streaming. It is the largest platform to host video blogging or vlog. YouTube has struck numerous partnership deals with content providers such as CBS, BBC, Universal Music Group, Sony Music Group, Warner Music Group, NBA and many more.

Moblog or mobile blogging is another form of blogging which uses only the mobile phone device to publish blog entries directly to the internet. With the invention of 3G, mobile phone boardband, it makes moblogging much easier. Users of camera phones can even publish photos instantly after taking up to the Web server.

Splogs or spam blogs are blogs which are created by the author to increase their page rank in the search engine. 'The ease of creating and updating webpages with Blogger has made it particularly prone to a form of behavior known as link spamming. Blogs spamming can be recognized by their irrelevant, repetitive, or nonsensical text, along with a large number of links, usually all pointing to a single site.' (Blogger, 2008) This form of blogging is a form cyberspace misuse and can even clog up the search engine.

Recently, readers of hardcopy media have turned to reading online books, online newspaper and online magazine. Everyone is aware of the environmental issue going on. People are going paperless therefore online reading is much more 'environmental friendly' in a way. Although Jakob Nielsen did said that people read 25% slower on screen then on paper, but it is easier to read in a website because all the information are already organized and compound. Take print newspaper and online newspaper of The Star as an example. The readers need to flip through the entire newspaper like to know all the headlines of the news in a day while in the newspaper online website, readers can straight away go to the archive and read through all the headlines in one page. For readers who are always on the go, online reading is the better option.

Web Design vs Print Design - Part II

In my previous post, I've talked about some of the print media and how do their designs function in conveying the meaning of the content to the audiences. In this post, I'll be discussing about web design. The internet has become an alternative tool to obtain information in today's world. Blogs, Youtube and other websites can provide more information compared to conventional media because the limitation on the internet is still very little. People get to know things happening in the other side of the globe on real time or get excess on overseas' media just by a single click. However, to create a successful website, not just the content, but it's design must also be taken into consideration.

Jakob Nielson, a web usability consultant, listed out three main guidelines for writing for the web.

• Be succinct: write no more than 50% of the text you would have used in a hardcopy publication


• Write for scannability: don't require users to read long continuous blocks of text


• Use hypertext to split up long information into multiple pages

He mentioned that readers read 25% slower online then on papers. Therefore, Diane Reep (2006) said, readers only 'scan' websites and they hardly read every single line and they only seek the information they want on the website. Articles in the web should also be written in inverted pyramid form, where the first few lines should already be enough to describe the gist of the whole article. If there is an elaboration, designers can create hyperlinks or hypertexts to split the information. Readers do not like to score up and down, left and right while they are reading. Hypertext will help in making the website more organize and reader-friendly.

When creating a website, a designer must understand that the readers will not read word by word but only scan through the web page in a 'F' shaped patent. Jakob Nielsen did a study that shows readers only read the first two lines in web page articles and then move vertically down through the rest of the article.


Source: http://www.useit.com/alertbox/reading_pattern.html

Web Design

Web page usually are design with headings, side column, main column. As I mentioned above, scannability is very important to a web page because readers do not like stare at the computer screen to read lengthy article for a long time. The partitions are to provide a multi reading path to readers while reading the web page. Kress G. and van Leeuwen T. said, in analyzing multimodal texts such as websites, they offers the reader a choice of reading path and, even more so than in the case of texts where a plausible reading can be discerned, leave it up to the reader how to traverse the textual space (Krees G & van Leeuwen T, 2006).


Source: http://thestar.com.my/

Above is an example of a good web design. The name of the website is visible enough on the upper left of the page. It has columns dividing the page into several parts. Readers can choose either to read the headline story first or other content such as the photo on the right of the page. The writing on the page are all succinct, therefore it is easier for the reader to focus on the text. There is also hypertext links to each and every news publish on the page, so that readers who are interested to read more can continue reading the whole report of the news.

Source: http://home.entouch.net/dmd/moreandmore.htm

Above is a website with bad design and you can see obviously, comparing this website with the one from web page, the lower one is not effective in conveying messages to the readers. The design of the website has no column and does not follow the F shaped patent of designing. There is no hypertext link for further information and no interaction at all.

Print design and web design basically share some similarity in designing especially multimodal documents such as a magazine and a website. The differences are the writing style and the hypertext link. All these aspect must be consider in order to create a functional and effective website.

Web Design vs Print Design - Part I

Print documents exist since the beginning of human civilization, however online media -- the internet came out as a new form of media just a few decades back. Discussing the effectiveness of these two types of medium, both serve the purpose of delivering messages to the readers. Especially now, the importance of multimodal document, the design of both text and images are equally important to deliver the correct message to the readers. According to Maureen Walsh (2006), multimodal texts are texts which incorparate a few elements such as text, visuals and sound.

Print Design

Lets us first discuss about printed documents. Printed documents, includes newspaper, magazines, novels, comics and etc, each has it's own unique method in delivering the messages in it effectively. How do we differentiate these few types of genre and categorizes them? We look at their most prominent differences, the design.

I'm taking a comic and a magazine design to make a comparison.

7 boxes Garfield comic

Source: http://www.geocities.com/EnchantedForest/Glade/8938/pizzacomic.gif

2 pages spread magazine about Ciara
Source: gossip2sweet.files.wordpress.com/2006/11/jet1.jpg

The design of a comic is obviously with more graphics and less wording. The framing of the comic is using symmetrical white space to separate each image and the colouration of the images combines all graphics in the comic to a complete document. The content of the document is mostly delivered by graphical narration, which means telling story with only images. However, filling in dialogs for the characters helps the readers to understand the meaning of the graphic more clearly.

As for the magazine, although images are used in the document, but they did not tell the content of the whole article. What makes sense in this article is the wording in it. Article is written in columns of four in two pages and the subject is always described in detail. This is because readers, when reading a magazine, their eyes will not always follow the text from the beginning of the left till the right end of the page, therefore the existence of columns are actually to help readers in reading more comfortably. Readers will first glance through the page and notice the most salience part in the article. That is why, normally the title of the article will be the biggest and eye-catchy among all the texts in the entire page, followed by the sub-heading. Readers will also look through the pictures and make sense with the headline to predict the content of the whole article. And then only they will read the content in it. Magazine articles can be written in more detail form because article such as feature witting requires the author to describe the whole agenda by words only. Therefore the author needs to make full use of the two pages to deliver as much messages in the content as possible to the readers.

Blogging Community

As I discussed about blogosphere in my previous post, I mentioned that blogs directly forms a virtual community, where all bloggers are interconnected and can communicate with one another depending on what are the similar interest they possess. For instance, a blogger published a post about the latest trend of fashion, other bloggers can link to the particular blog by typing the tag 'fashion' in any search engine. The responds of the readers will be reflected in the commentary column provided in the blog. That is also the most direct way to communicate to the writer about what their opinions are to the particular post, and then become a platform for the readers to share their interest and build a community out of it. Bloggers and readers socialize among themselves by sharing their opinion on a particular topic or even just to discuss their common interest. Now there are even bloggers community such as Nuffnang Malaysia creating a protal of all bloggers to gather and discuss exchange blogging experiences. Every now and then Nuffnang will organise meet ups and event to gather bloggers together to interact among themselves.

Nuffnang Malaysia Logo

Source: http://www.nuffnang.com.my/

One of my personal favorite blog is kennysia.com, a well-known blogger in Malaysia. I first came to know this blog last year when I was reading one of my personal friend's blog. In her link column, she listed some of her frequently visit blogs, and one of it was kennysia.com.

Kenny Sia's blog is mainly humorous. He uses humor to talk about serious issues such as elections, government policies and etc. However, he also writes reviews on places he'd been to such as countries, restaurants, hotels and more. Everyday, hundreds and thousand of people visit his blog and some even leaves comments for his post. By Googling the keyword 'kenny sia', the result shows 252,000 hits. Which means there are more then 2oo thousand articles about Kenny Sia can be found in the internet.



Even though he's not a full-time blogger, Kenny Sia is earning by blogging. Advertisers scouted for popular bloggers to advertise their product just by displaying a banner in kennysia.com. The more reputable a blog is, the more people will visit the blog. But how does people get to know famous bloggers?

Bloggers who own their own blog will post a link to kennysia.com and from there, people who visited blogs that are linked to Kenny Sia's blog will get to know his blog as well just by clicking the link. I have a personal blog that is linked to kennysia.com. Visitors of my blog can link themselves directly Kenny Sia's blog and from there we get to share our experiences and interest of visiting kennysia.com in the virtual world. And the threat does not end there. After they visit the blog themselves, they can either choose to comment on his page or link the website to the readers own blogs to introduce the blog to their own readers. The community keeps getting bigger and bigger and it will never stops. Therefore I said blogging forms an interconnected community, where everyone is connected to everyone.