This blog aims to discuss several media issues that is closely related to our real life and also analyse how does it affect us with the design and also the changing of genre from one to another. It also aims to help readers in further understanding the importance of document design. The audience targeted would be blogger, college level student and media professionals.
Phenomenon of blogging
Blogging has become a phenomenon in Malaysia. Most of the people blog, no matter they are youngster or working class or senior citizens, they blog to share their life and story. Generally, blog is a website or a space where people share their thought, share their life story and also discussion on certain topics. Many blogs provide commentary or news on a particular subject; others function as more personal online diaries. A typical blog combines text, images, and links to other blogs, web pages, and other media related to its topic. The ability for readers to leave comments in an interactive format is an important part of many blogs. Most blogs are primarily textual, although some focus on art (artlog), photographs (photoblog), sketchblog, videos (vlog), music (MP3 blog), audio (podcasting) and are part of a wider network of social media.
Purposes behind blogging community
Generally, the reason why people blog is to share their thoughts on certain issue, to share their everyday life story, to communicate with friends and family through regular posting, to do business by promoting their products online and for some bloggers, a blog is a space for them to express their feeling especially when they are down, in other words, escapism. For them, blogging is definitely not a waste of time, but still, for certain people, it is. For bloggers, they blog for purpose, therefore, it is not a waste of time for them to blog. Through blogging, they gain something in return such as comments, their friends, for business bloggers, they earn by promoting their products on their blog.
Below is a survey done on the purpose of why people blog:
There are variety of blogs that served different purpose and they are classifies as below:
By media – Classification of blogs based on media is blogs that uses different media to present. For example, photoblog is blog with photograph, vlog is blog with video and MP3 blog is blog with MP3.
By device – Moblog, blogs that are created using mobile phones and PDAs.
By genre – Blogs are also classified by genre, which is the issue they blog about. For example, entertainment blog, politics blog or personal blog.
Blogging community
A community blog is formed by a group of people that share the same interest. As the number of blogs increase everyday, there are also more and more blogging communities. For example, the project petaling street blog, a blog that collects all the interesting blogs and also Advertlets, Asia prominent blog advertising community.
The Advertlets logo
Sources: http://www.advertlets.com
Designing for online vs print
Online and print are two different genres but they are both example of multimodal text. According to Walsh (2006), multimodal texts are those text that have more than one ‘mode’, so that meaning is communicated through a synchronization of modes. Other than that, there is also different in affordance between online and print. . Affordances means what is made possible by the modes used (Walsh, 2006). For example, print-based text affordance lies in the “telling” in readers just read and accept what is given, on the other hand, the affordances in the website lies in the “communicating” in which readers get to navigate various section through menu bars, windows, frames and links (Walsh, 2006). For web pages, reader concern on the effectiveness of content and also the graphic integrity and legibility of the typography and the visual images (Schriver, 1997).
New forms of media publishing
A good example of new form of media publishing would be video log (vlog). Vlog is a blog that comprises video. Regular entries are typically presented in reverse chronological order and often combine embedded video or a video link with supporting text and images. More and more people are creating Vlog nowadays in order to share their story through video presentation.
Reference List:
Advertlet, viewed 1 November 2007,
http://www.advertlets.com/
Project Petaling Street, viewed 1 November 2007,
<http://www.petalingstreet.org/blog>
Schriver, KA 1997, Dynamics in document design: creating texts for readers, Wiley Computer Pub., New York. Chapter 6, pp.361-441
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
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