Good design for screen genre.

For our assignment, my group members presented on the topic Writing to Communicate. Although the presentation was very informative overall, it lacked strength in design and layout principles which could have engaged the audience eve more.

The first slide I will discuss is the following:

According to Bernahdt (1986)’s visual gestalt, there is good visual comparisons as well as continuation of text. But if we look at it from Reep (2006)’s perspective, there is little balance of the pictures present. The heading is clear as it allows the reader to focus on the top first to find the data and as we progress, see the top to find changes in topic. The spelling mistake of listerner makes the information look less credible and poorly collected to attract the reader.

This slide is a continuation of the previous slide hence there is no proper heading given to it. Reep (2006) mentions the importance of having lists and indentations in slides to make them more reader friendly. This is present in the slide which makes it a very attractive and easy to read pattern. The colour red on the word “example” places great emphasis that this segment is important and directs our attention towards it. It develops fluently as the climax is placed towards the centre of the page and the closure gives us a brief conclusion of the topic, hence this slide can be considered more appealing than the first.

This slide has a more balanced image and the visuals are balancing out each other due to their positioning. While one image is focused on writing and the other on hearing which commutates a speaker shows a summary of the topic being discussed. a The margins make the work look neat, the heading is clear and attracts attention.

Overall, I felt that the group presentation was verbally good, but slides were at times messy and poorly presented. The strength of this presentation was that it was very clear in conveying its message and the biggest drawback was that it lacked visuals to relate our theories to real-life perspectives which could have made the presentation more engaging.

References:

Bernhardt, S 1986, Seeing the Text, Composition and Communication, viewed April 12th 2010,

http://www.jstor.org/stable/357383

Reep, D 2006, Document Design, Technical Writing, 6th Edition, New York Ch. 6, pp. 133-172

New Forms of Media Publishing

Source: learningmatters.tv/blog/

Naughton (2006) believes that in the modern world, digital convergance, personal computing, global networking has caused radical shifts in the environment.

New trends of media that have emerged recently and has opened up a platform for society are Flickr, Youtube, Facebook, Twitter, E-books, Alternative online newspapers and online journalism.

Flickr allows you to share your work, entice audience, creating galleries and widgets allowing a feedback mechanism with comments, subscriptions to get individuals to value user generated content. According to Social Media Statistics (2008) Flickr now hosts more than 4 billion images.

Renata (2008) states thatYoutube allows students all over the world can get education free of charge. Obama used this device to promote himself during his campaign and after he got elected. This is so innovative that no president of the United States has used before and it made many rethink new media and politics. Many companies can have their commercials on YouTube. From TV shows to movies to compete with Hulu YouTube is searching new horizons. Online celebrities are created and people can use YouTube to communicate with others. They can use different tools within the site to do that including friends, subscribers, comments, playlists, ratings and, the most popular, views.

Nelson (2009) claims that Facebook, MySpace have changed the way we view our relationships. Everyday millions of couples meet online either because they do not have time to look for someone in a bar for example, or do not want to date someone that they met in the workplacor simply because they are shy.

At the current rate, Social Media Statistics (2008) show that Twitter will process almost 10 billion tweets in a single year. Trending topics keeps us on our toes on hot topics that are spreading across the globe.

Sungwoo (2008) talks about the swarms of amateur online journalists are putting this technology to use, on open publishing sites such as Indymedia and on countless weblogs, adding a grassroots dimension to the media landscape. As the public turns toward participatory forms of online journalism especially in countries like Iran, Malaysia, Indonesia, China , and as mainstream news outlets adopt more of those interactive features in their online versions, the media environment is shifting, slowly and incrementally, away from the broadcast model where the few communicate to the many, toward a more inclusive model in which publics and audiences also have voices.

References:

Centre for Communications and Civic engagement (2008), Centre for Communications and Civic Engagement, viewed April 12th 2010,

http://depts.washington.edu/ccce/digitalMedia/newsimpact.html

Naughton,, J (2006), ‘Blogging and the emerging media ecosystem’, viewed April 12th 2010,

http://reuteursinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/about/discussion/blogging.html

Nelson M (2009), Some bits, Nelsons Weblog, viewed April 12th 2010,

http://www.somebits.com/weblog/

Renata, E 2008, The Impact of Youtube, Blogger.com, viewed April 12th 2010,

http://youtubeimpact.blogspot.com/

Social Media Statistics 2008, Austin's New Media Lab, viewed 12th April 2010

http://www.scribd.com/doc/11481779/Social-Media-2008-Statistics

Sungwoo,C 2008, The Impact of Online Journalism, NowPublic, viewed April 12th 2010,

http://www.nowpublic.com/opinions/impact-online-journalism

Types, building and structuring blogging communities.

White (2004) defines a blogging community where people individually and collectively come together to express themselves. When people care about who said what and not just the what alone, this relationship forms a dynamic and links are no longer the only means of communicating a message across. Carpenter (2004) explains that people join communities for different reasons, have different interests and participate in different ways. There is no guaranteed formula for the success of a community and no single model that has been shown to work every time.

Source: www.gamexeon.com/forum/

To create a blogging community, it is very important to organize yourself interms of the content that will be added, the layout, style, and tools that will attract the audience. List your blog permalink in directories. According to Wordpres (2008) permalinks are the permanent URLs to your individual weblog posts, as well as categories and other lists of weblog postings. The URL to each post should be permanent, and never change — hence permalink. There are many blog directories on the Internet to chose from. A simple Google search for "blog directories" will bring thousands of results, hence marketing your blog.

One way to create a community is to have a signature link to your blog on message boards and forums. According to Perez (2008) The most natural place to start to create ‘community’ on a blog is within its comments section. This is a good place because in our day and age it is a place that most web users are ‘wired’ to look for interactivity in. Most bloggers have them – they’re on by default when they set their blog up and they never switch them off. They see the comments as adding a lot to the blog – making it a place of shared learning, interactivity and dynamic conversation. Other bloggers decide not to have them. Their reasons vary from not having time to moderate them to being frustrated by comment spam.

Martin (2007) thinks that tags have a lot of potential. To a certain extent, they could be used to replace searching, if done well. The tag cloud is easy to scan. A list of tags will be clearly recognised as such if it is in a cloud. The cloud works because it fits a lot of information into a small space, and is easy to scan over. The tagging system is useless when the tags you use vary.

According to White (2004), there are 3 kinds of blogging communities. The first kind of blog is the Blogger Centric Community where the one is blog is owned by one owner or organization with readers and commentators making the community. The second kind is the topic centric community where the central focus is on the topic of concern and power and identity of bloggers is distributed across the community. Last is the boundaried community which a collection of blogs and blogs readers are hosted on a single site.

An example of Blogger Centric community can be Blogger.com itself. There is a blog owner of a group of people owning every blog with whom the power rests, , they may emerge overtime, share personal details via private email, instant messaging “widgets” that are given on the website Comments can be allowed and not allowed but the latter would allow no visible manifestion of the blod. Blogs on blogger are almost broadcast-like where people talk about their topics of interest, their day, their lives and commentators can only comment and critique on that but not control it.

References:

Carpenter,T 2004, Designing for an online community: a guide, Australian Flexible Learning Network, viewed April 12th 2010,

http://www.flexiblelearning.net.au/guides/onlinelearningcommunity.pdf

Martin, M 2007, Using Categories and Tags Effectively on Your Blog, Problogger, viewed April 12^th 2010,

http://www.problogger.net/archives/2007/09/27/using-categories-and-tags-effectively-on-your-blog/

Perez, S 2008, Blog Comments Still Matter, viewed April 12^th 2010

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/blog_comments_still_matter.php

White,N 2004, Blogs and community- launching a new paradigm for online community? Full circle associates, viewed April 12th 2010,

http://www.fullcirc.com/weblog/2006/12/blogs-and-community-launching-new.htm

Wordpress (2008), Codex, Wordpress. Org, viewed April 12^th 2010,

http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks

Classification of blogs and opinion about the most appropriate classification approach.

Herring (2004) classifies blogs into the following categories:

Source: kt.flexiblelearning.net.au/

1. Educational Blogs- the blog serves as an accurate summary of the course that prospective students or new teachers can refer to.

Source: www.becker-posner-blog.com/

2. Legal B"law"gs- Blogs by lawyers or law students, which discuss law and legal affairs are often referred to as "blawgs."

Source: http://blogs.statravel.com/

3. Travel Blogs: Allows modern-day travelers with blogs as a way to share their stories and photos, even while they are traveling around the world.

Source: http://www.bookninja.com/

4. Literary Blogs- Bloggers write about the publishing industry, writing, current fiction, poetry, literary journals, reader's diaries, criticism and genres of literature.

Source: http://www.nationhealth.blog.com/

5. Health Blogs- Recent trend deals with actual patient cases. This blog allows other physicians to submit cases to the web site. Physicians can then offer comments or help with the case.

Source: http://www.blog.facebook.com/

6. Topical Blogs- These blogs focus on very particular niche. An example is Facebook Blog, which covers nothing but news about Facebook.

Source: http://blog.sellingtoconsumers.com/

7. Business Blogs- Used as the core of the business bringing in revenue from advertising, selling products or information

Source: http://www.blogspot.com/

8. Personal Blogs- Blogs where people can easily talk about their hobbies, their life experiences, day to day events, share their own artwork, poetry, photography and allow others to contribute.

Source: http://technorati.com/

Political Blogs- Current trends show that candidates in elections, use blogs and incorporate them as part of their own campaign mechanisms.

When classifying blogs, it is necessary to primarily know your target audience, which is then followed by the topic being focused on, and then style and format. If your blog doesn’t reach your audience, it will just appear as another redundant piece of work adding onto the blogosphere. The availability of visual design elements - division of the screen into columns, image use, color and typeface choice says Hagerty (1996) and along with the placement of elements on the page permitting meaning to be suspended in the visual according to Lacan (1998), allows for non-textual self-expression.

Simons’ (2008) classification shows that she has minutely broken down the category of personal blogging and put them in separate categories of disgests, popular mechanics, exhibitioning, diary whereas in Herring (2004) classifies all these four categories in one. It seems that Simons has devised these results more on focusing on individuals rather than looking at the full picture. Herring’s classification is more or less, sums up the types are classified into. Gatewatchers and advocates contribute a small portion as compared to the blogs published on literary, health, topical legal issues. Hence I think Herring’s classification is more clearer and balanced as compared to Simon’s classifications.

References:

Hagerty, R. E 1996 The Elements and Principles of Visual Organization, Eyes on the Future: Converging Images, Ideas and Instruction, International Visual Literacy Association, pp.273-273

Herring, S. C, Scheidt, L. A, Bonus, S, & Wright, E 2004, Bridging the Gap: A Genre Analysis of Weblogs, In Proceedings of the Thirty-seventh Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, Los Alamitos

Lacan, J 1998, What is a Picture? The Visual Culture Reader, 2nd ed, pp. 126-128, London, Routledge

Simons, M 2008, Taxonomy of Blogs, ABC.net, viewed April 12^th 2010

http://www.abc.net.au/rn/mediareport/stories/2008/2372882.htm#transcript

Blogs as current phenomenon & benefits to the community

Blogging today is simply the most explosive outbreak in the information world since the Internet itself. It has penetrated into our lives with its easy access and flexibility to express any message that we wish to convey across borders and boundaries.

McLean (2009) explains that the 2009 State of the Blogosphere survey demonstrates, the growth of the blogosphere's influence on subjects ranging from business to politics to the way information travels through communities continues to flourish. It is difficult to count the exact size of bloggers due to so many platforms, types and metrics, but according to Social Media Statistics (2008). Blogger.com was seen to alone have grown by 68% compared to 2007 and 184 million people started a blog. Micro-blogging site Twitter grew an unprecedented 752% with 4.43 million monthly visitors. Hence 2009 was projected to continue to grow and be accessible to more individuals.

In European countries, Brown (2008) claims that blogging attracts the business-minded and sets a forum to discuss social issues, whereas in Asian cultures, blogs are used to voice political opinions. The Star (2009), quotes Utusan Malaysia that blogs in Malaysia ranked amongst the highest in the world. It has about 500,000 bloggers after Indonesia and the European Union.

In Iranian context, according to Rowse (2009) 40 newspapers were banned over the last 5 years and during electionslast year, it banned journalists from moving around the country and blocked Facebook, Twitter, and other sites. In this setting, disenfranchised Iranis have often turned to the blogosphere to engage in commentary critical of the regime.

This benefits the community that the blogs provide as a breakthrough for the medium and deeming the blogosphere as both a key driver of the protests and a source of news more reliable than any other source in the country.

References:

1. Brown, S 2008, Leading Average: Top Blog Trends, Modern Life, viewed April 12th 2010,

http://modernl.com/article/leading-average-top-blog-trends

2. McLean, J 2009, State of the Blogosphere 2009 Introduction, Technorati.com, viewed April 12th 2010

http://technorati.com/blogging/article/state-of-the-blogosphere-2009-introduction/#ixzz0lN2t3bxm

3. Rowse, D 2010, Blogosphere Trends- What are bloggers writing about, Problogger.com, viewed April 12th 2010

http://www.problogger.net/archives/2010/04/07/blogosphere-trends-what-are-bloggers-writing-about/

4. Social Media Statistics 2008, Austin's New Media Lab, viewed 12th April 2010

http://www.scribd.com/doc/11481779/Social-Media-2008-Statistics

5. Sussman, M 2009, Day 5: Twitter, Global Impact and the Future Of Blogging- State of the Blogosphere, Technorati.com, viewed April 12th 2010

http://technorati.com/blogging/article/day-5-twitter-global-impact-and/page-2/

6. The Star 2009, Blogging in Malaysia ranks among highest in the world, Star Online, viewed April 12th 2010

http://thestar.com.my/news/story.asp?file=/2008/4/3/nation/20827588&sec=nation

The purpose of this blog.

Welcome to this IPD weblog which, by the end of this semester, will provide you with a professional approach and in-depth analysis to current issues, trends and theories in publication and design that aim towards one main goal- effective communication. My target audience, in this case, will be my course mates for whom it is necessary to learn more about the issues and trends so that later they can apply in their own professional lives.