Journey will continue...

As I have been working on this blog regularly for more than a month now, I thought it would be time to reflect on the experience I have been through so far. There are many things I have learned on this task.

Some lessons I learnt from Kian Ann of blogopreneur.com would be certainly helpful for me to continue blogging. I’m now exploring other areas of interests to share things I know or would like to know. I think I should soon start writing on adventure tourism and travel, social welfare and media education.

When I started blogging, I thought it was only for sharing personal views and opinions like a diary. But during the course of time, I have discovered it as diverse and dynamic as any other mass media. On top that blogs can be a good source of income, too. Now I’m looking into this new venture seriously.

Lately, I’m learning on designing and layouts as well as search engine optimisation and social media marketing. As for now, I’m working on free templates and platform at blogger.com. I’ve learned that I can upgrade it and buy space online to create my own blog. Hopefully, I would do that soon.

After reading about 15 or more professional blogs, I think I have to go a long way to before I become a ‘professional’. However, whatever knowledge I have gained so far will definitely push me through this and I see the goals are not so far.

I have found the platform – blogger.com very user-friendly and comes with loads of features that aspiring bloggers like me need. So for now, I will continue my exploration on blogging through this platform. I believe blogs can also be as effective as any other form of media to educate, entertain and inform people.

Photo source: https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg0Fq5xsopZ0qeWYv1_hilXaOxV4QCNifS4Jdf9atFUNpJZLuLcbvNiUH693yrtcy7QrpPNMe90meigrK2wRxlefl_fzlMGQHP9qu0tdCECCnRXZXTwEmXs3m7FT1JAZr9likR-Df2m1r8/s1600/never+a+dull+moment.jpg.

Citizen journalism: Can it be an alternative?

Mass media have always been in forefront to inform, educate, and entertain people. Traditional media such as newspapers, radio and television have (and still does), remained a major source of news and information.

Traditionally, media contents are produced by professional journalists and distributed to larger audience. However, eroding trust in the news media and widespread public disillusionment with politics and civic affairs led to rise of citizen journalism in the late 1990s.

Citizen journalism is the concept of members of the public playing an active role in the process of collecting, reporting, analysing and disseminating news and information. In a report: ‘We media: How audiences are shaping the future of news and information’, authors Bowman and Willis says: “The intent of this participation is to provide independent, reliable, accurate, wide-ranging and relevant information that a democracy requires.”

Citizen media has bloomed with the advent of technological tools and systems that facilitate production and distribution. Of these technologies, none has advanced citizen media more than the Internet. With the advent of Internet and its rapid development since 1990s, citizen media has responded to traditional mass media's neglect of public interest and partisan portrayal of news and world events.

There are many forms of citizen-produced media including blogs, v-blogs, podcasts, digital storytelling, and more and may be distributed via television, radio, internet, email, and many other forms. Many organizations and institutions exist to facilitate the production and distribution of media content by citizens.

The media content produced by citizens may be as factual, satirical, neutral or biased as any other form of media but their objectivity is what often critiques questioned about.

References:

Bowman, S and Willis, C 2003, We media: How audiences are shaping the future of news and information, the Media Centre at the American Press Institute, Reston Virginia.

Wikipedia, Citizen Journalism, viewed 19 February 2010, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizen_journalism#cite_note-wemedia-2.

Photo source: https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgP1Tlri7aygmnvDuW74thqFNCGk8JZLBUIjmVyqhqt06cQ5IIaeP3xyahyTcXWIIpYqQe0aj32Zq5GNrcY_UvSzu3Z_hR4BtWq-F333Tl-nfAs4dl4tmYYJEHJ4ycdcMFbBAQgiSQ3LfC2/s1600/News_Flash.jpg.

End of free news online?

Debate is on and news media companies across the world are considering the best way to make money from the internet, particularly in a time of falling advertising revenues.

The debate got a new height after media mogul Rupert Murdoch’s announcement last summer that his company—News Corp—would start charging for news content online. He believes that the company could produce “significant revenues from the sale of digital delivery of newspaper content” (BBC 2009).

News Corp owns the Australian in Australia, the Times and Sun newspapers in the UK and the New York Post and Wall Street Journal in the US.

Following Murdoch’s footstep, the New York Times last month announced that it would make people pay for reading articles and news content online starting next year.

The move strikes at the heart of the debate within the publishing business—whether to continue giving away valuable news and features on the Web, or start charging at the risk of losing readers.

Few weeks earlier, I had an opportunity for a chitchat with Shiva Khadka, a journalist of Nepal's leading web news portal, www.nepalnews.com. For charging online content, he says: “It’s not a new idea and nothing comes free".

The Financial Times and Wall Street Journal already charge readers. In the region, malaysiakini.com is a successful venture that runs on online subscription model.

He admits that charging for online content is partly to supplement on revenues of media houses. But he says: “The readers (subscribers) get more differentiated content and access to old archives, among others.”

However, a latest survey by Nielsen Co., shows that 85 per cent internet users believe that online content that is currently free should remain free. The online consumers may be more willing to pay for certain categories, such as movies, games, TV shows and music, and less likely to pay for news, blogs and user-created-videos.

I think the debate has to go on. However, the companies considering to charge for their online content must understand the fact that for a sustainable venture pricing should be a consumer driven.

References:

BBC News, viewed 17 February 2010, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/8186701.stm.

Bdnews24.com, viewed 17 February 2010, http://www.bdnews24.com/details.php?id=151603&cid=21.

San Francisco Chronicle, viewed 17 February 2010, http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2010/02/16/BU591C2C99.DTL.

Photo source: http://garcya.us/blog/wp-content/uploads/2009/07/creative_character_newspaper_monkey.jpg

Blogging, marketing and money

For the past one and half months, I have been surfing internet more than before looking for contents that are useful and worthy to share through this blog.

While I was surfing Internet, I came across a blog marketing tutorial site – www.blogopreneur.com, in which a Singaporean blogger Tan Kian Ann shares his thoughts and ideas for blog marketing. He provides tools, tips and learning resources to use blog as a marketing and communication.

I have also joined his blog marketing e-course, which is free and registration is very simple. I hope to learn a lot about blogging as well as blog marketing through this 10-daylong tutorial.

Kian Ann says the purpose of the course is to serve useful tutorials so that blogs will achieve better search rankings, traffic and ultimately bring in more customers. In the blogoprernuer.com, he offers free tutorials, tips for marketing, optimisation, Internet marketing and other related issues such copyright, social media marketing as well as working from home.

As discussed earlier, many blogger today use blog as marketing and publicity platform for their products and services. Blog marketing the process of reaching a business’ prospects through the use of a weblog and is becoming increasingly popular, especially among individual blogger.

The important statistics from the blogworld exposhows that over 12 million American adults maintain a blog and 1.7 million of them say they blog to make money. The figures also show that 51% of blog readers shop online.

These figures from the US alone may not be a proper yardstick to measure popularity of blogsphere for marketing and business. However, the trend towards making money through blog is certainly increasing worldwide.

References:

Blogopreneur.com, viewed 16 February 2010, www.blogopreneur.com.

Important blogging statistics, 2009, viewed 16 February 2010, http://www.blogworldexpo.com/general-information/important-statistics.

Photo source: http://www.smallfuel.com/images/uploads/small-business-blogging-med.jpg.

I found my long lost friend in Facebook

When I first heard about Facebook in late 2006, I took it lightly and didn’t give much interest. In 2007 summer, a friend of mine went for a trip to the United States. He kept posting updates of his journey in Facebook every other day. This lured me to open an account in this social networking site.

And, I also did same during my trip to France, Italy, Norway and Sweden in late 2007. I got a lot of responses from my friends and families back home. Since then I have been logging into my Facebook account every other day and now I’m connected with over 500 friends from all over the world.

My good experience with social network sites like Facebook has been very good in maintaining and expanding network of friends.

Moreover, I found a long-lost school classmate last year through Facebook. I hadn’t heard from him for more than 10 years. We are really happy to be reunited after a decade, thanks to Facebook. Many things have happened and many things have changed in our lives. He now works in a resort in Maldives and I’m here in Singapore.

My last week’s experience is also worth to share here. I was hospitalised for a spinal infection. I posted a short message on my Facebook wall saying I was warded at Singapore General Hospital. I got at least 50 ‘get well soon’ messages after five minutes of posting. Wow, so amazing that so many people are connected through Facebook.

That’s why social networking sites like Facebook is so popular today.Facebooktoday has more than 400 million active users and about 100 million users access the site on their mobile phones.

Today, it is not unusual if you often hear your siblings or your friends talking about the people they have met and made friends with through the Internet as social networking is one of the phenomena that have taken the world of Internet by storm. Almost every Web surfer has an account in at least one of the social networking sites, for these sites are the more enjoyable places to hang around in.

The idea of socializing with millions of people of different backgrounds excites the Web surfers. This is one thing that you can hardly do outside the virtual world.

Reference:

Facebook Statistic, 2010, viewed 16 February 2010, http://www.facebook.com/press/info.php?statistics.

Photo source: http://www.montana.edu/freshmen/facebook_pic.jpg.