Blogging so far has been a journey of self discovery and trying new things for me. Throughout the past weeks I have seen my writing style change and I am writing with more confidence and distinction than I have recently. The interjection of our personal ideas into the blog is something that has given me confidence and a voice on the online community. I decided to write about my travelling experiences in my life not on a superficial level but in a way that I describe how they made me feel and really accentuate the identities of the places I have been. Examples of this are London Part One and London Part Two.

I have been able to implement the workshops from class into these posts. Particularly the idea of adding media to excite the reader and give them a visual tool. This all has to do with my online identity. This idea of identity in todays society is more prevalent as we deal with such a large medium of the digital world. We no longer are given work to consume then forget and move on. Today through the use of platforms such as the blog we are able to continuously update and reignite the things we write about. It has become more apparent to me the idea Adrian Miles talks about, that we have to give back to the community. The more we take the more we give back, which is essentially the foundation of the networked space. I explain this more in my post Print to Network.

The other major thing I have learned from my experience so far is just how much goes into creating and maintaining a blog. You need determination, organisation and you have to be creative and new all the time. Although we have prompts and readings to write on, starting a blog from scratch is hard work. The most fragile aspect of it though is ensuring that you are careful when it comes to copyright. I have learnt a lot about what it is to copyright and also that you need to protect your own content through the use of creative commons licensing. In a way it is a catch twenty two that you want your content out there for people to read but you don’t want it to be left unmonitored and leave yourself open to being copyrighted illegally. The challenge I face is that I need to use picture as aids for some of my posts but I have come to the conclusion to use my own pictures and ensure that brand names and copyrighted material are not shown in those pictures. I reference the idea of copyrighting in my post Copyright and Creative Commons.

Overall, the experience I have had so far has been a positive one. I could see this as a good creative outlet and a way to keep in touch with the ever-changing online landscape. With the idea of Hypertext and Hypermedia being accessed by the click of a button it is important that we keep up to date for personal and also professional reasons.

Ideas Referenced

Landow, George P. Hypertext 3.0: Critical Theory and New Media in an Era of Globalization. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2006. Print. 69-71, 77-85

Miles, Adrian. Network Literacy: The New Path to Knowledge [online]. Screen Education, No. 45, 2007: 24-30.

http://www.artslaw.com.au/info-sheets/info-sheet/legal-issues-for-bloggers/