Tag Archives: networked media

What’s a blog?

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Blogs appear on the news pretty often these days. For example, a reporter is tipped to a story by a blog, or a blog reports another angle on a story. Blogs show up in magazines a lot, too. What are blogs? There are now millions of them — where did they all come from?

One of the things that is so amazing about blogs is their simplicity.

Think about a “normal Web site.” It usually has a home page, with links to lots of sub-pages that have more detail. Most traditional Web sites follow this format. If the site is small, it is sort of like an online brochure. If it is large, it is like an electronic encyclopedia.

A typical Web site has a home page that links to sub-pages within the site. CNN.com is typical of this genre. The CNN site contains thousands of articles all organized into big categories. The categories and all the latest stories are accessed from the home page.

A blog is much much simpler:

  • A blog is normally a single page of entries. There may be archives of older entries, but the “main page” of a blog is all anyone really cares about.
  • A blog is organized in reverse-chronological order, from most recent entry to least recent.
  • A blog is normally public — the whole world can see it.
  • The entries in a blog usually come from a single author.
  • The entries in a blog are usually stream-of-consciousness. There is no particular order to them. For example, if I see a good link, I can throw it in my blog. The tools that most bloggers use make it incredibly easy to add entries to a blog any time they feel like it.

In this article, you will have a chance to enter the world of blogging. You will even learn how to create your own blog and publish it to the world.

Week 1.2 workshop

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With prior experience in bloggings, I’ve learnt how to start up my own blog and change my themes, layouts and other settings according to what I want. There are many advantages to knowing HTML, and believe it or not, you don’t really need to know much, and once you get the logic of it, it’s actually pretty easy to learn. Here are a few examples of what HTML looks like:

 

  • Images: <img src="http://yourimageurl.com" alt="cool image"/></img>
  • Links: <a href="http://yourblog.com" target="_blank"/>Awesome Blog</a>
  • Font size: <font size="6">Look at the size of the text!</font>
  • Font color:<font color="red">Look at the color of the text!</font>
Nowadays, when I need to do something in HTML and don’t know the code, I use Google. There are plenty of great resources, for instance w3schools.com has everything you need to know about HTML.
Another way to learn HTML is to look at your posts in HTML mode in your blog editor. I used this a lot when I wanted to have special text treatment or was learning how to imbed an image, or make a bulleted list. Trust me, I’m a slow learner, and this helped a lot.

Finally… practice, practice, practice. Code doesn’t stick in my head easily, but after blogging for the past almost five years, I can make an image with a link that opens a new page in my sleep. Which comes in handy because a lot of times code puts me to sleep. Anyway, learning HTML will really help you get started on being more independent and help you get a good start to pushing your blog to the next level.

 

 

 

I was paid to blog

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Prior to this course, I’ve started blogging since I was 16 but have stopped for a couple of years now. The blog started off as a personal journal, going through my daily rants and thoughts. However, somehow viewership started to increase and I was asked to be part of a company that recuits bloggers with a certain amount of viewership. Advertisments are then being placed into our blogs through a simple copy and paste method of certain html codes. We are then paid either by advertorials, through blog posts or pay per click advertisments that are being displayed on our blogs. It was good at the start, seeing money roll in. However, I had to juggle many advertorial posts and my daily life, something I soon found hard to do with exams nearing in. I soon started procrastinating on my blogposts and updates on my blog got lesser in time. So did my viewership. It took up too much time and effort despite the money. I also realised that my posts were no longer personal. But filled with advertorials and posts that my readers wanted to read. But it was an experience and the networking I made during this couple of years was incredible. I’ve met so many different people of different backgrounds. Many from different professions blogged for passion, for fun as a side project but it is through their blogs that you get to see a different side to them. It was an incredible experience, and something that everyone should experience. Now all that’s left is a memory of my blog and all memories of its glory at Http://black-stilettos.blogspot.com

Networking mess

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Blogging is not something new to the online community, in fact it’s been around since forever. We’re the creators of the content we input, we control what we write and the comments written by others online. We filter what we dislike and keep what we do. Most people use blogging as a journal, a form of expression or an online persona. We link our blogs to people of similar interests and get to know them. It is a different way of networking and meeting people from all over the world, some of which we may even be able to leverage on. Though not many use blogging for networking, but it is a good way of getting to know someone, their thoughts and we are able to exchange ideas through commenting and reading. It is definitely a must try method for networking and connecting.

Readings week 1

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This weeks readings talk about various methods of learning and observation situations. I learnt that through the purpose of noticing we are able to be impartial in situations and when the time comes to make decisions we won’t be swayed. It is said that in the readings that during discussions or decision making we tend to be more clouded in our choices and thoughts when we already have a structured ideology in mind. It is through noticing,evaluating and reflecting on our ideas that the chances of us making a more appropriate thought or action would seem clearer and make more sense. Now, when we take what we’ve read in the previous reading and then apply it to blogging we realise that what we put out onto the internet is clearly noticed and seen by many worldwide. And this is something that is not within our control. What we can control is, the contents that we put out there onto the world wide web and maybe setting up our spam filter. However, evaluating the contents written before posting it would be a wise option, it is something clearly within our control and can contain.

Keyboard Warriors

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Everyone who uses the internet is a keyboard warrior, we all have different personas and have the ability to create a new image of ourselves on the internet. Why do I use the term keyboard warrior?  “The Keyboard Warrior seeks to use the power imbued in his ‘weapon’ to effect death and destruction (in a strictly-metaphorical sense) upon his foes (other virtual identities he has encountered on the internet). In essence, the keyboard (ie. text input ability) allows the keyboard warrior to manifest his true warrior nature in a safe and removed environment, from which no real-life repercussions .” Via the world wide web all of us are safely tucked behind our computer screens and spinning images and tales of ourselves. What we want other to see is not necessarily what goes on in reality. Yet, it provides us an alternative route. Another form of redemption, to save ourselves from showing everyone the realities of what goes on in our actually very mundane life. This is what the internet has made of us – Keyboard warriors.

Week 1.1 workshop

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First day of networked media was honestly really dry. I found it too technical, not too much to my liking. Why should I be learning about Networking media. I know the internet is like the biggest source of networking but all these technical applications that I would learn about, read about or talk about – Would I even use them or take them with me when I enter the work force? Maybe because it’s the first class and the fact that I just got back from vacation makes me feel edgy about going to class during summer. But I’ll keep an open mind and look forward to whatever new insights and lessons that I’ll be learning ahead. Starting the blog today is a first step and I look forward to the next class on Wednesday! It’s gona be a mad rush during the 6 weeks but I hope it ends as quickly as soon as it came. In an enjoyable way of course!