I ponder first!

Blog?

According to SearchVB, a blog is (short for weblog) is a personal online journal that is frequently updated and intended for general public consumption. Blogs are defined by their format: a series of entries posted to a single page in reverse-chronological order. Blogs generally represent the personality of the author or reflect the purpose of the Web site that hosts the blog. Topics sometimes include brief philosophical musings, commentary on Internet and other social issues, and links to other sites the author favors, especially those that support a point being made on a post.

Blogs, are one of the hottest trends in society nowadays. It connects people to people and becomes an effective communication tool. Acording to Cymfony, corporate blog can be defined as blog that is created and sponsored by corporate entities. It is used in an organization for the internal employees to communicate to each other and send out information effectively between the organization and the employees.

There are many different type of blogs is set up out there for any kind of purposes and to suit the individuals need.


Why Blog?

They are a lot of people use blog as a communication tool to keep in touch with their families or friends. Personal blogs are the common and easily found in the internet. People use blog to link themselves to their friends, family and others to communicate.

In the world of business, blogs have become an advertising tool to promote products and services for some large corporations. The large number of the readership has attracted advertisers to use blogs as a tool for promotion.

For me, as a newbie in the world of blogging, personal blogging is not a waste of time because it can helps us to reach out to our close friends and family. It is a good way to share our daily lives with families and friends and keep ourselves updated to each other. I found that blogging can be a very effective method to reach out the audiences and share information with no boundaries.


Phenomenon of blogging

They are million of people blogging nowadays and it has become the one of the hottest trend in many countries. It might be one person who is reading another person's blog, they are four or five persons are creating blogs and starting to blog.

People like to expose themselves with words and pictures, sometimes even sounds and videos in their blogs. They usually sharing their personal life, daily happenings to their family and close friends with blogs.

In Malaysia, blogging is one of the hottest trends among youngsters, or even corporate organizations use blogs too. Soon, the number of bloggers will be increasing rapidly in Malaysia. During that time, blogs is not only use for sharing their personal lives, it becomes a way to seek information and make money as well just like a search engine.


Classification of Blogs

There are some blogs are set up to share information such as food blog, photo blog, gaming blogs, technology blogs, fashion blogs and so many more. Those blogs gathered all the people who sharing the same interest and link them closer to each other by providing information that they need. Different blogs serve different audiences.

Classification of blogs means that there are many types of blogs and each of them serves different information and targeting diferrent audiences based on the interest of its readers. A blog directory website is set up to make life easier for the readers to serach different types of blogs accordingly in the interent.


Blogging Community

Blogging community is set up when a group of people gathered to share their interest or passion. The more people in the group will automatically form a community and more and more people who are sharing the same interest will be joining in to discuss and share more information.

For example, DJ Blink has set up a community blog where other bloggers who are DJs as well come together to be part of this community blog. Another good example would be a community blog that set up by JUICE to link all the people who are interested in the clubbing scenes and hip-hop fashion.


Online Media Versus Print Media

Designing for online media and print media is completely different process. A good example would be newspaper and newspaper online. Newspaper online will not overtake the old printed newspaper media because both of them have their own target audiences. However, there are some differences between when designing for online media and print media.

There are a lot of things need to take into consideration when designing for a blog. According to Walsh (2006), the text of technoligical differences are designed to assist the reader's learning, to attract and to maintain reader's interest. Hyperlinks, animation, frames, menu buttons, mouse and many more that will be using in the layout of a blog are not exist in the layout of a newspaper. So, the design of the blog will be completely different when designing for a newspaper.

Besides that, reading in online media is a different process compared to read in print based text. Acoording to Walsh (2006), a reader's pathway can be multi-linear and multi-directional when reading multimodal texts. Compared to print based media, we have not many choices when reading a newspaper and people can choose what to read and what not to read in a blog. Information in newspaper usually lengthy and sometimes readers will feel tired of reading it. People do not read in the internet. They scan through most of the time. So, information on a webpage should be clear cut and concise.

Texts and visuals support each other. Readers do not just read the texts; they also read the visual presentation of the text (Reep, 1996). In designing a webpage (blog), putting visuals is a must in order to attract the readers. People will get bored if the blog is just fully of words. Sometimes, a good picture can maintain or increase the interest of readers and give more thoughts to the people as well.

The differences of designing for webpage (blog) and print media (newspaper) need to take into consideration in order to convey the message and reach out to the audience effectively.


New Forms of Media Publishing

People always use blog to write about their daily lives, share personal photos and communicate with their love ones, family and friends. However, there are some lastest blog publishing trends such as moblogs, photologs, mobileblogs and videoblogs.

Videoblogs are one of the hottest trend in society now. Nowadays, people do not just use words to express themselves. Recoding a video and post on the internet is so much more fun than just typing. Mobileblogs are also become a trend as well. Handphones with the lastest new technology can go online anywhere, anytime and they can blog whenever they want and wherever they are.

There are still alot more other types of blogs which are not known to people. As time goes by, technology will improves and more new types of blogs will come out to suit each individual needs.




References:

Reep, D.C 1996, Technical Writing : principles, strategies, and readings, Allyn and Bacon, Boston

SearchVB.com: The definition of blog
[Online, Accessed on 23 October 2007]
URL: http://searchvb.techtarget.com/sDefinition/0,,sid8_gci214616,00.html

TNS Media Intellingence/Cymfony: Glossary of term
[Onine, Accessed on 23 October 2007]
URL: http://www.cymfony.com/files/pdf/know_blogterms.pdf

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.