Blogs as Current Phenomenon & Benefits to the Community

The size blogosphere has been increasing tremendously from one year to another. Technorati’s (2010) findings in 2006 tracked 50million weblogs and also revealed that blogging activity is doubling in size every 200days and about 175,000 new weblogs were created everyday in the last three years. In addition, Pingdom.com (2010) recently published that there are over 126million of blogs in the internet.

Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and et cetera are known as micro-blogging site. It has been formerly used as a way to stay connected with friends/family now has expanded its importance for businesses for marketing such as branding and advertising as well (McGiboney 2009).

Malaysia has about 500,000 active bloggers, ranking the country among the highest in the world after Indonesia and the European Union, Utusan Malaysia reported (The Star, 2008). In Malaysia, blogs are often used politically, serving as the 'alternative voices' such as MalaysiaKini blog and the famous political blog by Jeff Ooi. The blog has become an effective tool for journalists as well as the activists (Sussman, 2010).

According to Universiti Malaya media department lecturer, Dr Abu Hassan Hasbullah, blogs has the power in influencing the thinking of people in Malaysia especially about politics (The Star, 2008). In the US, the overall growth in blog readership is attributable to political blogs (Pew Internet & American Life Project, 2005). Similarly in the Iran, political blogs is the trend where according to Nasrin Alavi (2005) blogs were created in Iran for freedom of speech and to protest against their government despite the strict state censorship on political internet sites.

References:

The Star, 2008. Blogging in Malaysia ranks among highest in the world. Viewed on 27 April 2011,<http://thestar.com.my/news/story.aspfile=/2008/4/3/nation/20827588&sec=nation>.

McGiboney, M 2009, Twitter’s tweet smell of success, viewed on 27 April 2011, <http://blog.nielsen.com/nielsenwire/online_mobile/twitters-tweet-smell-of-success/>.

Sussman, M 2010, Day 1: Who are the bloggers? SOTB 2009, Technorati, October 19, viewed on 25 April 2011, <http://technorati.com/blogging/article/day-1-who-are-the-bloggers1/>

Technorati, 2010, State of blogosphere, viewed 24 April 2011, <http://www.sifry.com/alerts/archives/000436.html>

Nasrin Alavi, 2005, We Are Iran, viewed on 25 April 2011, <http://bloggersenzafrontiere.blogosfere.it/files/WeAreIran_SampleChapterLo.pdf>

Pigdom.com, 2010, Internet 2009 in numbers, viewed on 25 April 2011, <http://royal.pingdom.com/2010/01/22/internet-2009-in-numbers/>

Classification of Blogs

In this day and age, the World Wide Web contains millions of blogs covered with different topics and targeting to different audiences. Smich (2010) argues that there are various kinds of blogs which range from diary types to news information types. As such, it is pretty hard to classify them specifically.

For myself, I categorize blogs basically by their subject matter. Such as:

·         Food

·         Law

·         Travel

·         Sports

·         Politics

·         Fashion

·         Technology/Gadgets

·         News

Generally, according to Farrington (2009), blogs can be classified into four basic types:

• Personal Blogs - Blogs that act as a diary.
• Corporate Blogs - Blogs specifically for one's business.
• Professional Blogs - Blogs that focuses and specialize in specific subjects and fields of work.
• Micro Blogs - Blogs that have short texts and they post up micro media like pictures.

On the other hand, Margaret Simons, an Australian author and media analyst, classified blogs into 9 categories (Funnell and Davies, 2008):

• Pamphleteering blogs - political, social movement.
• Digest blog - tend to point or to summarize or to collect material from elsewhere.
• Advocacy blog - pushing a particular point of view on a particular issue.
• Popular Mechanics blog - fascinating collection of information on how to do stuff.
• Exhibition blog - Vanity publishing, maintained by craftspeople, artists, writers.
• Gatewatcher blog - keep an eye on the media, gatekeepers.
• The diary - social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace (taken over the function).
• The advertisement - commercial companies flogging a product.
• The news blog - break news.

I believe there are more other different and unique types of blog will arise in the future which in turn there may be a rise in that one type of blog may overlap the others based on their classification. Therefore, a more specific classification is needed for the ease of identifying and classifying them. Here, we can see that Simons's classifications are a lot more specific than Farrington's classifications. As such, it is more detailed and provides easy identification to various blog classifications.

References:

Smich, M 2010, Different types of blogs, myhosting, viewed 6 May 2011, <http://myhosting.com/blog/2010/04/types-blogs-2/>.

Farrington, R 2009, 'Different types of blogs', viewed 6 May 2011, <http://www.articlemonkeys.com/Different-Types-Of-Blogs-8430.html>.

Funnell, A & Davies, A 2008, 'A taxonomy of blogs', viewed 6 May 2011, <http://www.abc.net.au/rn/mediareport/stories/2008/2372882.htm#transcript>

Simons. M 2008, Towards a taxonomy of blogs, viewed on 5 May 2011, <http://www.apo.org.au/commentary/towards-taxonomy-blogs-0>.

Blogging Communities

Blogging community as a general knowledge means that community consists of bloggers whose blogs are interconnected where a group of people with similar interest comes together and they interact with one another, forming a social network.

Blogging community can be created by several ways:

• Comments: 

Leaving comments in others’ blog is a good way to start interacting by means of asking questions and giving ideas. Also, Replying comments are a great way to get the ball rolling as it creates a sense of connection between the reader and the blogger (Mueller, 2009).

• Link: 

Creating search friendly permalinks are a great way to getting started as they act as a direct key to one's blog, saving time for the reader (Doolin, 2009). In addition, Linking out to other blogs is the essence of the spirit of generosity that is needed to have a vibrant online blog community (Bauer, 2006). This can be done by adding other blogs to your own blog roll and they will most likely return the favour which in turn increases traffic/readership of both at the same time.

• Reader centred/entertaining posts: 

The quality of one’s blog counts too as readers wants information, not crap (Rowse, 2008). Publishing posts about the readers can be done via answering their burning questions and inviting or posting up questions for discussion. This allows for more feedback. Also, entertaining posts will keep them coming back for more.

• Interactive tools: 

Posting quizzes, surveys, and weekly polls will allow readers to feel more connected as they are able to participate in the interactive projects.

• Promote:

One’s blog can be promoted via other media forms such as Twitter, Facebook and etc. This is useful to increase a follower which eventually increases the traffic/readership of the blog.

According to White (2006), there are three types of blogging communities:


One blog centric community:

Owned by one person or an organisation but may have multiple authors. Blogger have the ultimate power of control as the person can remove comment or censor certain readers.

Topic centric community:

Formed through a network of common passion driven blogs linked together and create membership and combination of domain within the community.

Boundaried community:

Compilation of blog readers on one site or platform. Registration is required in order to join the community or to be offered the chance to create a blog.

                Boundaried Community    One Blog Centric Community      Topic Centric Community             

(Source: White, 2006)

The community that we are familiar with is the boundaried community. Social networking site such as Facebook, Mysplace and Friendster are some of the examples for boundaried community. The structure of these is that a profile and login provide a clear identity, an entry point, and emphasizes the boundary of the community. In addition, to blogging and commenting on other blogs, the community uses other tools to connect to each other, and so dialog and interactions also take place outside of the blogs, with comments and posts often used as feedback and affirmation of these other interactions. The focus is on ongoing interactions between members, and norms and agreements across the community are emphasized over individual control. Individual identity is formed through participation in the community (Koterwas, 2007).

References:

Mueller, E 2009, 'How to create community on your blog (For WordPress Users)', viewed 3 May 2011, <http://blissfullydomestic.com/2009/how-to-create-community-on-your-blog-for-wordpress-users>.

Doolin, D 2009, 'How to easily create permalinks with post slugs that help your blog SEO', viewed 3 May 2011, <http://website-in-a-weekend.net/building-traffic/easily-create-permalinks-help-your-seo/>.

Rowse, D 2008, 'Secrets to good community and conversation on your blog', viewed 3 May 2011, <http://www.scribefire.com/2008/06/22/secrets-to-good-community-conversation-on-your-blog/>.

White, N 2006, 'Blogs and community - Launching a new paradigm for online community?', viewed 5 May 2011, <http://kt.flexiblelearning.net.au/tkt2006/edition-11-editorial/blogs-and-community-–-launching-a-new-paradigm-for-online-community>.

Bauer, E 2006, How to build blog traffic – community, BlogHer, viewed 3 May 2011, <http://www.blogher.com/node/8128>.

Koterwas, T 2007, Blogs and Community –Parts 1-5, WDIL, viewed in 3 May 2011, < http://www.wdil.org/resources/blogs-and-community-parts-1-5>.

The New Forms of Media Publishing

    Today in this progressing society, new media technologies have changed on how we communicate socially. With the emergence of new media trends such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Blogs, online news sources changed the roles of journalism & communication.

New media like these are able to deliver news and information to readers faster than the normal media like regular newspaper and magazines. Consistent with this, Silverstone (1999) asserted that, the Internet had greatly increased the efficiency of producing mass cultural objects and distributing them around the world.

  

For instance, the latest news about the dead of the world most wanted terrorist, Osama Bin Laden would not be spread so promptly and extensively around the world without these new media technologies (read news here). Printed newspaper could not have done this so promptly, I found out the news from Facebook itself spread by my friend circle and watched the breaking news itself from Youtube. In fact, according to The Telegraph (2009), The first recorded tweet about the New York airplane crash 2 years ago, came from Jim Hanrahan, four minutes after the plane went down.

All of the new media publishings have one thing in common, which is that they are all on the internet. The internet makes readers better informed, giving them resources that makes them more knowledgeable on the subject (Naughton, 2006). This bad side of using these new media is related to ethics, for example, Youtube , where it allows user to publish/upload video without being strictly screened for the content of video uploaded.


An example of this bad side can be seen in a number of videos published/uploaded by Wee Meng Chee or famously known as Namewee of him singing an edited lyric of Malaysia national anthem which rose up controversial issue which cased a racial tension among the Malaysian community. His conduct led him to face risks of being arrested under the ISA and worst, his citizenship being revoked (The Star,2010). Therefore, we must always bear in mind that freedom of speech should always come with responsibility.

Note: all of his controversial music videos can be found in-

<http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=namewee&page=&utm_source=opensearch>

References:

Naughton, John 2006, ‘Blogging and the emerging media ecosystem’, viewed on 4 May 2011, <http://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/fileadmin/documents/discussion/blogging.pdf>.

The Star 2010, “Namewee is ready to face the law”, viewed on 4 May 2011, <http://thestar.com.my/news/story.asp?file=/2010/10/20/nation/7257513&sec=nation>.

The Telegraph, 2009, 'New York plane crash: Twitter breaks the news, again', viewed on 4 May 2011, <http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/twitter/4269765/New-York-plane-crash-Twitter-breaks-the-news-again.html>.

Silverstone, R, 1999 ‘What’s new about new media?’ new media & society, SAGE Publications, London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi Vol1(1):10–82, viewed on 9 June 2011, <http://blog.lib.umn.edu/swiss/archive/Silverstone.pdf>