Sunshine in a Jar: An Introduction

Of Having a Little Sunshine in a Jar
Written in a fairly formal approach, this blog serves to inform and highlight in a credible manner issues pertaining to the media, design and publication industry. The primary audience of this blog would be students from the field of communication and design. This blog also caters to those who are interested in updating and keeping themselves informed with current media, design and publication issues.

Blogging: The Phenomenon
::: What is a Blog?
According to Pro Blogger (2005), Weblogs At Harvard Law School defines a weblog to be a hierarchy of text, images, media objects and date, arranged chronologically, and that can be viewed in an HTML browser.

::: Why Blog?
Blogging is sometimes viewed as a new, grassroots form of journalism and a way to shape democracy outside the mass media and conventional party politics as blog sites are devoted to politics and punditry as well as to sharing technical development (Nardi, Schiano, Gumbrecht and Swartz 2006, p.41).

However, a majority of blogs are written by ordinary people – like you and me – for a variety of reasons such as: to feed their love for writing, to share opinions, to earn an extra buck, to communicate and keep in touch with family and friends, to expand a business, to socialize and to discuss about their interest and passion.

Blogging has then been seen as a platform for users all around the world to interact and share their opinions and perceptions on different issues and at the same time having a choice to remain anonymous about it.

Women Rule in Malaysian Blogosphere: An online survey on the blogosphere in Malaysia, Blogging Malaysia: A Windows Live Report shows that women bloggers made up 64% of the respondents. Read more here.

image source: Microsoft Press Pass

When the blogging craze swept across Asia, Malaysia became a part of it. An online survey on the blogosphere in Malaysia, Blogging Malaysia: A Windows Live Report, showed that women bloggers made up 64% of the respondents, while men lagged at 36%, with a large majority of bloggers (74%) to be below the age of 25 years (Microsoft Press Pass, 2007).

::: Entertainment and Social Connections Top Reasons to Blog
Blogging Malaysia: A Windows Live Report, also found that Malaysian bloggers primarily blog for entertainment – to share personal life details with family and friends. The highest number of respondents (63%) indicated that they read blogs for entertainment, while 49% said they blog as means to keep up with family and friends (Microsoft Press Pass, 2007).

Interestingly, 56% of respondents said that the primary motivation for starting a blog was that they have views that they are passionate about and they want to express themselves by reflecting the liberating feeling that the online world presents to them (Microsoft Press Pass, 2007). In spite of strong passions, 74% of respondents declared that they have no particular agenda for their own blogs (Microsoft Press Pass, 2007).

Classification of Blogs
The varieties of blogs are classified as the ones below:

By Genre
are blogs classified based the different subject matter discussed. Examples:

:: political blogs :: corporate blogs :: food blogs :: fashion blogs :: splogs

:: niche blogs :: travel blogs :: project blogs :: dreamlogs

By Media
are blogs classified based on the media the blogs are presented. Examples:

:: vlog :: linklog :: photoblog :: tumblelog

By Devices
are blogs classified based on the devices used to compose the blogs. Example:

:: moblog

Blog Communities

Blog communities carry the idea of a social network at their root, in the sense that they strengthen communication and connections amongst different groups of people with a similar mindset (Kinkeldei B 2007, p.1).

Blog communities can be a term to describe the group of people using the same blogging platform, for example, blogspot or wordpress. Other than that, blog communities can be defined as communities which aggregate the individual and independent blogs of a number of people with a shared interest – the same cause, similar political views, business interest and so on (Kinkeldei B 2007, p.2).

In simpler terms, blog communities places focus on a shared interest, a cause or an organization. A blog community can be created through the means of hyperlinks where by individual or group bloggers places links of other bloggers of similar interest on their blogs, providing easy access to readers.

Designing for Online VS for Print

The characteristics of multimodality are equally important in both online and print designing. When communicating a message, online designing provides designers a opportunity to play around with the synchronization of different modes through the interplay of texts, visuals, sounds, animations and hyperlinks (Walsh 2006, p.24).

Print designing however, emphasizes on the interplay of visuals and texts as visuals could provide to a certain extent the means of persuasion which texts alone cannot fulfill (Kress and van Leeuwen 1998, p.187).

Nielsen (2007) states that 79% of users scan the page online instead of reading it word-for-word and reading from computer screens is 25% slower compared to when reading from a print document. Bearing that in mind when designing, it is crucial take into account the principles of designing which are balance, proportion, sequence and consistency (Reep DC 2006, p.135).

Not forgetting the use of appropriate typography along with the design principles is also important as it would help set up particular reading paths for readers. Design is not merely a form of decoration, every form has its function and a good design constitutes as effective communication.

New Forms of Media Publishing

Technological advancement has allowed the means of blogging to evolve – once only presented in a ‘diary’ or ‘journal’ form, has now developed into something so much more. Fuse technological wizardry has allowed blogging to take a much ‘cooler’ approach where by blogs can be presented in form of vlog, photolog, linklog, moblog and so on.

Reference:

Kinkeldei B 2007, Whitepaper Blog Communities: Forging Connections and Promoting Growth Through Blog Communities, 21 Publish Cooperative Publishing, viewed 30 October 2007, <http://www.21publish.com/pub/21publish/blogging-whitepaper.pdf>

Kress, G & van Leeuwen, T 1998, ‘Chapter 7: Front pages: (the critical) analysis of newspaper layout’, in Bell, A & Garret, P (eds) 1998, Approaches to media discourse, Blackwell, Oxford, pp. 186-219.

Nardi, BA, Schiano, DJ, Gumbrecht, M, & Swartz, L 2004, ‘Why We Blog’, Communication of the ACM, vol. 47, no. 12, pp. 41- 46.

Nielsen, J 2007, Writing for the Web, Sun Microsystems, viewed 30 October 2007, <http://www.sun.com/980713/webwriting/>

Reep, DC 2006, Technical Writing, 6th edn, Pearson/Longman, New York.

Walsh, M 2006, ‘The ‘textual shift’: examining the reading process with print, visual and multimodal texts’, The Australian Journal of Language and Literacy, vol 29, no. 1, pp. 24-37.

What is a blog? 2005, Pro Blogger, viewed 30 October 2007, <http://www.problogger.net/archives/2005/02/05/what-is-a-blog/>

Women Rule in Malaysian Blogosphere 2007, Microsoft Press Pass Malaysia, viewed 30 October 2007, <http://www.microsoft.com/malaysia/press/archive2006/linkpage4337.mspx>