The Life and Times of a Blogger

Reflection

2008-06-13T02:38:00.003+08:00

Blog has been a online expression tool for the people regardless who they are. I admit that, I benefit a lot from building this blog, from understanding the layout, words form, and imaging plus knowing that, there are actually certain steps in designing a document. Blog is just one of the examples, but it is also the most famous online document that most people build and view as well like Nielson mention, the content in a webpage must be short and direct due to reader does not read exactly word by word, they just scan trough. Not only that, the genre used must be suitable, so that the reader find it easy to read, and will not confuse with each words used.

To be honest, bloging is really fun, where you can voice up your opinion, post up your interest, and talk about your favorite. Sometimes, people record their daily experience and that is where reader can learn some experience from the blog.

Hence, the blog era will continue rise in this ages of information. And in the near future, it is believe that blog might become one of the biggest flows of information.

Revolutionizing

2008-06-13T02:22:00.001+08:00

Edit the Story Base on Your Preference

Have you actually feel that you do not like the plot of a movie or novel? Or do you hope that, the ending of your favorite show are slightly better, where the main actor does not need to sacrifice? Well, actually, there are things called fan fiction. According to Rebecca Tushnet, she define fan fiction as “any kind of written creativity that is based on an identifiable segment of popular culture, such as a television show, and is not produced as ‘professional’ writing” (McCardle. 2000). Today, a lot of teenagers begin to write their ‘edited story’ in their blog. Sometimes, people feel fun reading other people creativities; the reader can feel an entire new plot new experience. An example of fan fiction website, Harry Potter FanFiction Archive, users are allowed to create their own story using the same character such as Harry Potter. In this webpage, you can actually find tons of different story create by public for the great Novel Harry Potter.

There are many reasons that drive individual author for writing fan fiction. Some may write for training purpose. An example in the McCardle article, Erin Bartuska, he begins to writes fan fiction at the age of 15. His favorite is to write fan fiction and whenever people give feedback, he feel great because he know where has he went wrong and what is the current demand of the reader (McCardle. 2000).

What about Pattern? Copyright? GoodWill?

You may have been wondering whether this is against the copyright law or not. To be truthful, YES, writing fan fiction dishonors the copyright act. However, the main objective of copyright law as stated in McCardle’s article is:

“the primary objective of copyright is not to reward the labor of authors, but to promote the progress of science and the arts. To this end, copyright assures authors the right to their original expression but encourages others to build freely upon the ideas and information conveyed by the work…. This result is neither unfair nor unfortunate. It is the means by which copyright advances the progress of science and art”.

Therefore, a fan fiction authors need determine exactly what is concerned with the piece of fan fiction and the fan fiction author must recognized their work as just a fiction story create by them which is not the official one. Also, they must obtain the precise permission of the copyright holder to start with the fan fiction work.

Reference List

Harry Potter FanFiction Archive - FanFiction.Net
http://www.fanfiction.net/book/Harry_Potter/

McCardle. M 2003. Fan Fiction, Fandom, And Fanfare: What’s All The Fuss. B.S. Journalism, B.A.Theatre, University of Florida http://www.bu.edu/law/scitech/volume9issue2/McCardleWebPDF.pdf

The Business Mind

2008-06-13T01:43:00.003+08:00

Generates money from blog?

People will probably wonder, it is true? We can earn money from blog? The answer is clearly a ‘YES’. No joking, there is a blog that allow people to earn, since bloging activities is rising, more and more people begin to view each other blog. People begin to develop a blog advertising community.

Current phenomena
Lee (The star online) written in the article that, with more people surf around the internet for all kind of information, news and services, it is no a big surprise that advertisers are also tracking the online space. An example will be Google, they have begin a function in their website called Google Adsence, where they allow people to advertise in their webpage. Yahoo, they launched blog ad network in year 2005 after knowing Google is doing well with their blog advertising tactic (Olsen. CNetNews. 2005, also they even challenge Google in term of lower the price of advertising. In Malaysia, there are 2 blog-advertising communities which are Nuffnang.com and Adverlets.com. As for your information Nuffnang.com is Asia’s first and leading blog advertising community (Nuffnang.com 2008) followed by Adverlets.com.

The Tactic

How actually this works? And how blogger earn from there?. Well, first of foremost, bloggers who signed up have to go trough a survey, then the blog-advertising system will analyse the data to create the profile of the specific blog. Basically is to know what the blog is about and whoa re the audience. On the other hand, there are also requirement for this, such as an average number of visitor per day. Then, the advertiser will specific their target audience and budget for the advertisement they trying to advertise, next, the blog-advertising system will match the needs of the advertiser and the blog which suit their needs (Lee. The Star Online 2007)

Once the agreement is done between the advertiser and blogger, an ad campaign would be generated and that ad will appear in chosen blog.

However, in order to make the blog and advertisement a success, there must be a good combination of both. Both must relevant to each other, as Shriver (1997. p.411) mention that pictures and text used can affect the clarity and engagement of the message.

Reference List
Lee S.W, 2007, Blogging And Big Buckshttp://star-techcentral.com/tech/story.asp?file=/2007/5/29/itfeature/17847964&sec=itfeature

Nuffnang http://www.nuffnang.com.my/about-us

Olsen, S, 2005. Yahoo to launch blog ad network. http://news.com.com/Yahoo+to+launch+blog+ad+network/2100-1024_3-5815551.html

Shriver, KA 1997, Dynamics in document design: creating text for readers, Chapter 6, pp.361-441, John Wiley & Sons, Inc. New York.

For Freedom!

2008-06-13T01:32:00.005+08:00

A blog can be like a personal online diary where one expresses their feelings and opinion and readers are invited to leave their comment or be restricted from doing so. In a blog, users have the right to talk, express their view or comment on any subject they want. In general we are always told that one of our rights as a human being is the freedom of speech but in reality tells us a different story. In Universal Declaration of Human Rights, under article 19, it clearly stated ‘Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.’

The Control
In context to Malaysia, the government tried to enforce a law which would have forced the bloggers to register themselve if they wish to use a Malaysian hosted blogsite (The Star Online 2007). To many people including politicians this is something not only unnecessary but also intervening ones right. As described earlier, by definition blog is something where you can express your opinion and as a human being we have the right to do so. Attempting to create such blogs is like an indirect threat to bloggers telling them to be careful about what they write, as the writers can be traced back.

We do know that even if we have the freedom to speak, we should not say anything that directly insult or offend any person or group or any community, especially in public. The blog sites do have one clause saying that as the user posts the blog and it is not monitored by the blog owner so the user will be responsible for if anything is held against the writing. So people should have the sense at least to know what they should write and to what extend. In other words no one should misuse the power or opportunity they have to write in a blog without any restriction on writing.

Reference List

The star online, 2007. Reference for registration for bloggers..
http://star-techcentral.com/tech/story.asp?file=/2007/4/5/technology/20070405153418&sec=technology

Universal Declaration of Human Rights 1948-1998 http://www.un.org/Overview/rights.html

Wiki?pedia? - The precision of information

2008-06-13T00:59:00.004+08:00

Wikipedia, one of the well known encyclopedias in the world, or to be specific, in internet that contain large amount of information available multilingual, simplify and easy to read. In addition, it is free online sources where people are allowed to contribute or share their knowledge in different language. And because of anybody, any person, even youth are allow editing an article using a wiki markup language that offers an easy option to HTML, that cause a big question mark to the reader whether the information he or her read in this encyclopedia are factual or not.

According to Voss (2005. p1), this well-known online encyclopedia was originated from a Nupedia project, this project was found by Jimmy Wales. In 2001, wikipedia was form as a side project to permit collaboration on articles earlier to entering the lengthy peer review process and soon, it grown to more than 1.8 million articles in 200 languages. Some 800,000 entries are in English.

The test by “Nature”

In the article from BBC NEWS During the year 2005, a research analysis has been conducted by Nature to investigate the reliability of information stated in wikipedia. Their strategy is evaluating the articles which found in Wikipedia and Encyclopedia Britannica. The reviewers were required to scan for mistake in the sources, however they were not told where is the sources come from. In short, the reviewer does not know whether the sources are from Wikipedia or Encyclopedia Britannica. As a result:

"Only eight serious errors, such as misinterpretations of important concepts, were detected in the pairs of articles reviewed, four from each encyclopedia,"

Reported Nature

Thus, the reviewers also identify a number of factual error, oversight or false statements which is 162 in Wikipedia and 123 in Britannica.

“We're very pleased with the results and we're hoping it will focus people's attention on the overall level of our work, which is pretty good”

Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia founder

Today, Wikipedia seem more popular among the young people, especially student. Well, fine, I admit that read a lot of article in Wikipedia and sometimes use the information in my academic nevertheless, all these information are still need to be clarify before using it, it is not about plagiarism but the accuracy. Why? Wikipedia is a free encyclopedia where anyone can just share their knowledge online. When reading one of the sentence in the article, it sometimes make reader think where is this information come from or it is support or has been clarify by any professional or they just make it up?. How actually I examine the information is through the citation and reference list found within the article itself. Otherwise, find someone who has the real knowledge and standard like professor to clarify the information.

On the other hand, some professors in university actually agree with Wikipedia. As the Harvard teaching fellow Abdur-Rahim Syed wrote in his email that Wikipedia is good for providing overviews of non-controversial and broad topics, but not good for news, commentary, or anything with polarized opinions (The Harvard Crimson, 2007)

Another reason that makes Wikipedia so famous is because of the layout of the website. Based on Jacob Nielson (1997), webpage suppose to be simple and easy to read, as reader will not spend most of the time viewing the screen due to the damage cause by the monitor to human eyes. Wikipedia has a better information management system, the topic will divide into different accessible sub-heading which is in the content bar found at the top page.

Reference List
British Broadcasting Corporation, 2005. Wikipedia survives research test.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/4530930.stm

Child, M, 2007. Professors Split on Wiki Debate. The Harvard Crimson
http://www.thecrimson.com/article.aspx?ref=517305

Nielsen, J, 1997. How Users Read on the Web http://www.useit.com/alertbox/9710a.html

Voss.J 2005. Measuring Wikipedia. Humboldt-University of Berlin http://eprints.rclis.org/archive/00003610/01/MeasuringWikipedia2005.pdf

Broadcast Yourself at YouTube.

2008-05-10T05:16:00.002+08:00

The New Form of Media Publish

No matter it is online or the printed version of document, it always full with words. The reader like us does not really like to spend time read words by words just to understand one or two main meaning in one sentence.Also, is it quite difficult for writer to put what we want to say in a sentence such as motion or describing an atmosphere of things around them. The easier way is to record it down, of cause, you will require a video recording device. One example will be, during a press conference, compare to record in a paper or type in down into your lap top, wouldn’t it is better if we just take out a video recording device and record the situation.

When mention about posting a video or publishing a recorded document, people always refer to YouTube. It is a free of charge video streaming ‘blog’ or ‘vlog’. YouTube was the first free video sharing website. It established on 2005, people begin to post their video to YouTube and share with the public. Currently, most people like to record their opinion and express themselves not by words but they want motion and share it with the public. However, due to YouTube is a free video website and the massive number of user in it, it has now facing a lot of problem that link with sensitivity or community. One example of issue that happen in Malaysia is that, the video “Negarakuku” by Namewee has received massive feedback from the government saying that, the content in the video offended the Malaysian Citizen. Another problem that the community found using YouTube is that, during the past, it actually allow any form of video to be uploaded to the website, this mean that, even pornography can be found in YouTube (Polly, A, Jean 2006). Nevertheless, Youtube has begin their policy and disallow pornography in their website.

Reference
Jean Armour Polly (2006) Commonsense Media Blogs. http://www.commonsensemedia.org/website-reviews/YouTube.html Viewed 8 May 2008

Online Document or Printed Document

2008-05-10T04:27:00.002+08:00

Designing for online vs Print
Internet user like us, does not actually read the content in the webpage word by word, sentence by sentence. Internet users normally scan the page rather than read the entire page. They will only pick the main point from what they see on the webpage and then proceed to other webpage to obtain the information they desire (John Morkes and Jakob Nielsen 1997).

Based on Wilson, Cornwell and Heath (2003) idea, they state that, e publishing is actually more advantage than the printed version. Logically, one of the advantages is that it saves cost. Secondly, the technology advancement enable tons of creative function to the e publishing and make job much easier such as posting relevant picture in the article and managing the content in the article.

However, it is still depend on the type of document that the writer wish to compose, if the writer wish to create book, then the printed version is prefer. This is because of the number of words as well as the content in the document that require reader to spend time to read through each sentence.

Reference
Nielsen, J, 1997. How Users Read on the Web. http://www.useit.com/alertbox/9710a.html Viewed 5 May 2008

Wilson, S, Cornwell, L & Heath GD 2003, Publishing newsletters on paper or online: a profile of how three chapter editors did it. Society for Technical Communication http://www.stcsig.org/usability/newsletter/0308-whyonline.html Viewed 7 May 2008

The Army of BLOG

2008-05-10T03:41:00.002+08:00

Types of blog or classification of blog

General speaking, blog can be in any type depending on what the bloger wish to put in his or her blog. Therefore, in the current trend, we can find many blog having multiple topics in it. Though, there are still some general type of blog in the internet. Below are the lists of common blog in the internet era.

1. Vlog (a video blog)
2. Linklog (links to other sites)
3.Sketchblog (portfolio or sketches)
4. Photoblog (a photo blog)
5. Moblog

During the past, text and image are the most popular blog in the internet. However, when blog activity begin to rise, there are more and more type of blog appear, some are even the mixture of blog. One good example will be the famous moblog in United Kingdom, where people take picture or video with their mobile phone and post it on blog, we classify this blogging as ‘moblog’.

“Moblogging is taking pictures and videos with your camera phone and putting them on the internet.”
Moblog.co.uk

Today, it is very difficult to classify what exactly the type of blog we are viewing. What listed above are some of the pure or core blog that are still existing today.

Blogging community
Today, many people especially the young generation, they like to expand their network as in have more internet friend to share their interest. Friendster, one of the most famous networks building blog in Malaysia. People explore the network and post comment to their for their friend to maintain and build the relationship. Moreover, in Friendster, people create a group for a common topic, and invite friend to join. In the group,they actually post and share their interest. This is one of the ways, how blogger build and maintain in the blogging community. When they are more people view their blog, the founder of the particular blog will feel more motivated to update his/her blog, so that people will often view it

According to Pipl (2008) research, Friendster have about a total of 39259 profile which taken 77.1% of the entire internet social network and the growth is about 80% each year.

Reference

Moblog:UK. 2008. What's this moblog thing all about then? http://moblog.co.uk/help.php?intro viewed 5 May 2008

Pipl 2008, Statistic http://www.pipl.com/statistics/social-networks/size-growth/?l=1142 Viewed 7 May 2008

Blog? So what?

2008-05-10T03:22:00.002+08:00

Today’s Trend
Bloging has become one of the famous activities among the young generation in the internet today. It is all contributed from Bloger.com website which formed during 1999. During 2007, there are about 120,000 of new weblogs generated worldwide everyday (Johnson, 2007).
In the current trend, people like to write about their favorite such as artist, vehicle, sport, you name it. They will then comment on the subject they post, expressing their opinion towards it. In some cases, bloger allow the public to post their comment or in other words feedback on their opinion. This creates argument towards the topic. From here people will able understand the subject from different point of view.

The advantage of Bloging
Blog has created an opportunity to the public to voice out their opinion. According to Microsoft (2008), there are only small amounts of audience for each blog, according to their research, 40% of the total blog have less than ten visitors. Nevertheless, blog are more trendy in Korea, up 11% of blog in Korea have more than 50 visitor per week (Microsoft 2008).

Through the research by Microsoft Group (2008), they conclude that, blogging has become a social phenomenon to Asians. It is one of the internet tools that the Asian utilize it to maintain and build their social networks as well as to express themselves.

Reference
Johnson, B 2007, Blogs mark the first 10 years, Guardian News & Media Limited http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2007/apr/07/blogging.news Viewed 6 May 2008

Microsoft 2006 Blogging Phenomenon Sweeps Asia, Press realease http://advertising.microsoft.com/asia/NewsAndEvents/PressRelease.aspx?Adv_PressReleaseID=296 viewed 6 May 2008

2008-05-09T23:09:00.000+08:00

The purpose of creating my serious blog

Blog has been around for a long period. Today, it expanded and becoming trendier where people begin to create blog to express their feel and opinion. For example, some people write their own dairy, some people post picture and share with public, some even comment on the politics and express their disagreement.
The purpose I am writing blog is to express my opinion and discuss about issues concerning document design and publication. It is very important for the people nowadays especially the young generation to understand and analyze what is publish as well as how to publish your own idea.

Benefit
This blog will provide a clear view on what are the current blog trend and the impact of blog towards the society.

Target Audience
This blog is mainly for the youth especially the college level student or above who seek to know more about the current trend of blog plus to gain more understanding regarding publication issues. Moreover, this blog can also be benefit to those who are in the industry firm to obtain benefit for their future use.