Tag Archives: blogging

Assessments, Networked Media

Tagging and taxonomy

There are two main taxonomies used in blogging: categories and tags. Categories are what they sound like: top-level, broad categorisations usually referring to the type of content. Categories are arbitrarily named and differ from blog to blog. For example, a political blog might have categories like “News”, “Opinion”, “Investigative Reporting”, etc., while a sports blog could have categories like “Football”, “Basketball”, “Hockey”, etc.

At a more granular level are tags. Tags are arbitrarily named keywords that are generally used to indicate that a certain topic, person, company or thing has been mentioned or referenced in a post. This aids readers and researchers looking for information on a particular topic find posts that match. The sports blog, for example, might tag a particular player or coach in every post mentioning their name, and then readers could find all posts relating to that player or coach in the one place.

While typically a post will belong to one or very few categories (because content generally only has one type), conventionally tags are much more liberally used and a single post could potentially have dozens of tags depending on how many things are referred to in the post.

Categories and tags became extensively used on the internet with the rise of blogs (and in particular the Web 2.0 era of the early 2000s), because they provide a handy way to categorise and search large volumes of information without having to perform a resource intensive full-text search. The general idea of categorising and tagging has existed in bibliographies for centuries, but its particular digital form has only come into widespread use in the last decade or two.

The WordPress knowledge base has a more detailed explanation of the difference between tagging and categorising.

Tagging isn’t necessarily limited to blogs. On the film diary service Letterboxd, where I often post short reviews of films I watch, tags are used extensively by users of the site in a number of ways. Tags like watched-at-the-cinema or watched-on-netflix indicate the circumstances in which a film was watched, and tags like 52-films-by-women are used by people participating in group-watching marathons and challenges. This particular tag helps bring together all of the people participating in a challenge to watch one film directed by a woman each week of the year, enabling them to meet and engage with each other through Letterboxd.

I use categories and tags extensively on this blog. I use categories to split up my posts according to the subject for which they’re created, such as the Networked Media category. I also have tags like blog-checklist, which collects all of the posts that constitute the first Networked Media assessment task.

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Assessments, Networked Media

Anatomy of a blog

Blogging grew out of early publishing on the web, a mix of personal and news websites. A lot of this legacy still defines how blogs look and how they work. The header is like a newspaper masthead, the footer is similarly influenced by print publishing, and the column layout (including a sidebar and a main content area) is reminiscent of newspaper layouts. One major affordance of blogs is that they present posts in a kind of endless and ongoing timeline, in reverse chronological order, with pagination to limit the number of posts per page (like books).

The internet and the web are the other major influence on the blog format, such as the use of hypertext to including rich media and hyperlinks to other websites, or the use of widgets which bring content from other locations into the blog’s context. This is a result of the fact that the web is dynamic, with content stored in databases and presented to the user through the use of a content management system, with the look and feel controlled by templates. Authors don’t have to manually build every single page they publish, a lot of the code can be re-used or embedded from elsewhere. This turns the author’s focus to the content itself, rather than the context in which it sits.

This dynamism also enables rich metadata and posting properties (back-dating or forward-dating, viewing/editing permissions, drafting, etc.), none of which was possible in print media.

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Assessments, Networked Media

Blogging ethics

The defining characteristic of blogs is that they are online, therefore public and accessible to people of all kinds from anywhere in the world. Though they share some characteristics with journals (chronological posting order, often filled with personal thoughts), it’s important to remember that they’re anything but private.

Online communication has allowed all kinds of voices to flourish and find their own space on the internet, including those usually suppressed or drowned out. This is good in many cases, but it can also shed light on undesirable groups and opinions that the world really doesn’t need to boost, such as hate groups. My own use of the internet has enabled me to find scenes and subcultures aligned to my interests (particularly in the art and culture space), but I’ve also witnessed some truly horrible things online. The overall effect is in my case a net positive, but for some people the internet can be a huge, unfriendly, frightening and unwelcoming place.

Today, social media websites are increasingly good at allowing users to control their privacy settings and decide who can see what they post, which is good in that it gives users control over their content, but it can also condition people to think they’re operating in a bubble away from the prying eyes of the world. It only takes one incident to shatter that illusion. The author Jon Ronson wrote a book about people whose careless posting on social media had a huge negative impact on their lives, called So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed, which does a great job of exploring the strange public-private dynamic of online spaces.

I’ve honed my online public persona for a number of years (on personal social media, on professional networks like LinkedIn, and on my own websites) and this blog is just another extension of it. I’m quite comfortable with the “voice” I’ve developed, though I’m sure that if someone Googled my name or trawled through my Facebook timeline they could find something I would consider embarrassing.

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Assessments, Networked Media

Blog Case Study – kottke.org

Following on from my earlier discussion of blogs and what function they serve in media education, I’ve been revisiting a couple of my own favourite blogs and seeing how they fit into the blog landscape.

Kottke.org was founded in 1998 by Jason Kottke, an American web developer and writer who was an early adopter of many of the web’s nascent technologies, including blogging. I’ve been reading the site since around 2004 or so, when I was reading a lot of technology writers like Daring Fireball and others who would link to Kottke’s posts with unceasing regularity.

Its primary editor is Jason Kottke himself, and the site is officially “authored” by him, though there have been times when guest editors like Tim Carmody, Sarah Pavis or Adam Lisagor took over for days or weeks at a time while Kottke was on holiday or taking a break. The use of guest editors has ensured that at no point over the site’s 19-year lifespan has there been a significant dip in the amount of content being posted to the site.

In terms of content, kottke.org is simply an aggregation of interesting links from around the web, mostly under the topics of technology, arts and culture (and particularly where these topics intersect). Each post typically takes the form of a quote or embedded image/video at the top, followed by a paragraph or two of written commentary providing context and opinion. In this sense it is a typical “filter blog”, and indeed helped popularise that format in the blogging space.

Since 2005, writing for kottke.org has been Kottke’s full time job. He is an extremely prolific writer, with between one and ten new posts going up on the site every single day, and it is for this reason that his site has remained popular since its founding. No more than a day goes by without new content being added to the site, so readers can continually come back and find something new and interesting to read.

Kottke has a long track record of drawing attention to prominent artists, technologies, services and products long before they become popular in the wider world. There was a time when Kottke was among the web’s most influential figures, particularly in technology and culture circles, and his posts spread far and wide across the internet as bloggers added their own thoughts on the topics he would write about. This is one of the main reasons I enjoy reading kottke.org and still read it today: feeling connected to the newest and best things happening in the worlds of technology and culture.

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