EXEGESIS – What’s in a blog is a blog.
For my Web Presence assignment, I wanted to specifically construct a site that not only amalgamated aspects of my ability as an amateur photographer with an old digital camera taking interesting photos, but also promote a site that reflected my immediate environmental surroundings and enabling me to demonstrate my understanding of the use of Web 2 tools. During my participation in the Web 101 unit, I have learnt that Enterprise 2.0 Technologies (McAfee, 2006) have developing platforms that enable individuals to design, create, install and utilise tools in ways that allow discussion, accessibility and sharing of information by either a small or large number of people. In participating in the unit, I have expanded my knowledge base concerning Web 2.0, blogging, Wikis, Social Networks, content sharing, Internet footprints, digital shadows, social mediums, and the possible future trends of the Web. Keeping in mind those aspects of my newly developed understandings, I have designed my presence to utilise some of those tools as a means to share my thoughts, images and information to those that might wish to view them. Why the mountain you may ask? I look out every day and see such a magnificent back drop; I simply cannot resist capturing the image and that of surrounding Hobart on as many photographic jpegs that my old Kodak 5 megapixel digital camera’s memory card can hold.
I have chosen a Web 2.0 social software platform in the form of a public blog to be my central node for my web presence. Jill Rettberg discusses the aspect of self publication in her work Blogs, Communities and Networks, “... You could choose to publish part of your story online, as a blog, you share with others ...” (2008) With a blog, I am able to harness the convenience of a journal like format that allows feedback and follower’s participation while utilising mechanisms that enables archiving of information for what could be an indefinite amount of time. This will allow readers to come back and view a record of my endeavours at their leisure. I chose to utilise the free online Google blog tool ‘Blogger’ after experimenting with Wordpress, Blogger as my foundation node because of the ease of setting up and partly because of Rebecca Blood’s comment in How Blogging Software Reshapes the Online Community in that, “... Blogger really was easy to use ...” (2004) from my personal experience Blogger is actually very easy to use, as I have had no previous experience with using a blog; I delegated to go the easy path.
Blogger has its own design editor in the form of the Blogger Template Designer which allowed me to upload and install one of my own mountain photographs as part of the back ground. I have used my own photographs throughout the blog and although there are no restrictions of copyright, I have taken the step to licence my work with the Creative Commons Organisation and in doing so their Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported licence covers my images and articles. When I initially built the blog site, I chose a ‘simple’ template for my blog’s design format and correlating colours to complement the background graphic. Because the template allows for customising, a degree of flexibility has enabled me to add widgets where I thought they would be of best visual prominence. Having made the decision to keep the blog as user friendly as possible, but not overly too simplistic, I have included a number of contributing nodes on the home page as well as the very important Web 2.0 RSS feed for subscribing to my posts and comments.
The four contributing nodes that I have selected to represent my interests, FriendFeed, Twitter, Google Reader and Flickr are designed to represent my online identity. The first of my contributing nodes is FriendFeed, an aggregated service that allows the amalgamation of a number of Web 2.0 tools that I have nominated such as Facebook, Twitter, Flickr and Delicious. FriendFeed has made it easy to share information with a number of people who would not have otherwise accessed my blog. The node on my home blog page links to this centralised hub feed and FriendFeed reciprocates back to the site. If you access my FriendFeed page, you will notice that I have kept with a uniformed theme of the same photograph as a template.
The second node that I have selected is Twitter – Updates. A tool that allows for immediate viewing of micro blogging Twitter conversations “... people use micro blogging to talk about their daily activities and to seek or share information ...” (Akshay, Song, Finin &Tseng 2007) Again, it is an aggregated feed, showing the reader near instant viewing of my ‘tweeted’ messages and initiating a sense of instant activity within the blog. As with the previous site, I have kept the same theme photograph to give a sense of continuity across the platforms.
My third widget provides readers with access to my iGoogleReader, ‘Loulounilly’s Google Reader Shared Items’. The site engages viewers to read items that I have found interesting and subscribed too. The site is more of a literary tool where I have been able to access information in relation to mountains and other subjects. My fourth and final node is my Flickr stream, located at the bottom of the blog home page. This widget is important to the blog as it is also an aggregated feed in relation to my photographic surroundings theme. I created a page on Flickr where I am able to upload the majority of my photographs and they are stored in an online repository for my images that I have taken with my old Kodak digital camera. The stream of photographs of the mountain and surroundings feeds back to my blog which makes it a perfect medium to assist me in building and maintaining the nature of my site.
The second node that I have selected is Twitter – Updates. A tool that allows for immediate viewing of micro blogging Twitter conversations “... people use micro blogging to talk about their daily activities and to seek or share information ...” (Akshay, Song, Finin &Tseng 2007) Again, it is an aggregated feed, showing the reader near instant viewing of my ‘tweeted’ messages and initiating a sense of instant activity within the blog. As with the previous site, I have kept the same theme photograph to give a sense of continuity across the platforms.
My third widget provides readers with access to my iGoogleReader, ‘Loulounilly’s Google Reader Shared Items’. The site engages viewers to read items that I have found interesting and subscribed too. The site is more of a literary tool where I have been able to access information in relation to mountains and other subjects. My fourth and final node is my Flickr stream, located at the bottom of the blog home page. This widget is important to the blog as it is also an aggregated feed in relation to my photographic surroundings theme. I created a page on Flickr where I am able to upload the majority of my photographs and they are stored in an online repository for my images that I have taken with my old Kodak digital camera. The stream of photographs of the mountain and surroundings feeds back to my blog which makes it a perfect medium to assist me in building and maintaining the nature of my site.
During the Web 101course, I have looked to incorporate and utilise a number of Web 2.0 tools in creating my web presence that I have studied along my educational highway. My choices are reflective of my ability to integrate these technological items so that they enrich the purpose and information exchange of my blog but also take into account ease of access, usability and integration. I feel satisfied that I have not only addressed the requirements of the assignment but produced a site that I am proud to share with either a small or a large audience.
References
Blood, R (2004) How Blogging Software Reshapes the Online Community. Communications of the ACM Volume 47, Issue 12 (December 2004) Published by ACM New York Retrieved November 19 2010 from http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1035134.1035165
boyd, d. m. , & Ellison, N. B (2007) Social Network sites; Definition, History and Scholarship. Journal of Computer Mediated Communication 13(1) article 11 Retrieved November 19 2010 from http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol13/issue1/boyd.ellison.html
Java,A Song, X. Finin, & Tseng, B. (2007) ‘Why We Twitter: Understanding Microblogging Usage and Communities’, Procedings of the Joint 9th WEBKDD and 1st SNA-KDD Workshop 2007, August 12. Retrieved November 19 2010 from http://ebiquity.umbc.edu/get/a/publication/369.pdf
McAfee, A.P ((2006) Enterprise 2.0: The Dawn of Emergent Collaboration. Volume 47. Number 3 Published by MIT Sloan management Review. Reprint 47306. Retrieved November 19, 2010 from http://www.wikiservice.at/upload/ChristopheDucamp/McAfeeEntrepriseDeux.pdf
Rettberg, J., (2008), Blogs, Communities and Networks in Blogging. Polity Press; Cambridge Retrieved November 19 2010 from Curtin University of Technology Library E-Reserve
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