Friday, May 2, 2008

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 The main stream media will always have a bar to follow, which certain issue which are consider sensitive will not be published in the daily news letter nor broadcast in the television and radio.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.

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