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.

Why blogging?

So far the journey of blogging has been enjoyable. Today, I’m trying to look into a few nitty-gritty of blog. Since I started writing this blog, I’ve become a good blog reader and spending a good chunk of time on blogs.

I found blog, in general, as an alternative but advanced form of traditional personal diary writing, although there are tens of thousands of blogs other than personal. It is a quick, cheap, effective way of making one’s voice heard by millions, not only just an outlet to write thoughts or feelings.

I also found that many are doing online businesses through blogs and professionals and companies are using blog to engage their clients as well as educational institutions, government, politicians and many more are today in the world of blogging.

The popularity of blog has risen so high that popular Time magazine has started rating of blogs to create an annual best blog index. The magazine’s 25 best blogs 2009 shows that the best blogs in the world spanned from politics, housekeeping, astronomy and everything in between.

The number of blogs, which has skyrocketed since its initial use at the beginning of the 21^st century, also shows that how important blogging has become today. According Blogpulse stats, there are more than 126.86 identified blogs in the world.

As I mentioned earlier, blogging today is not only limited for expressing personal feelings or opinions, it has expanded its scope to so many other areas. There has been a lot of talk lately that traditional blogging has lost its relational focus and many are leaving the world of the blog. But, I think blogging will continue to enjoy a boom as innovation of new technology and addition new features have been constant to meet ever changing tastes of people.

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Reference

25 best blogs 2009, Time, viewed 9 February 2010, <http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/completelist/0,29569,1879276,00.html>.

Blogpulse, viewed 9 February 2010, <http://www.blogpulse.com/>.

Print publications on web

One thing, we all certainly agree is the advent of information and communication technology (ICT) that has revolutionised almost everything in our life.

Let’s look at media. Most traditional media, such as television and newspapers, are reshaped or redefined using the technologies of the Internet. Print publishing has been reshaped into websites, blogging, and web feeds. The Internet has enabled or accelerated the creation of new forms of human interactions through instant messaging, Internet forums, and social networking sites.

The world is constantly becoming faster and more demanding. People want news and information wherever they are, at any time. As a result, most publications are expanding their businesses through World Wide Web or into other similar ICT enabled services.

The reality is that there are so many ways in which people can access information, today. Media forms like the internet and mobile phones have made it so easy for people to obtain news updates, sports scores, stock reports and so on. News and advertising mediums like newspapers have been compelled to broaden their scope to the internet as well, in order to keep up with the booming business of online communication.

The majority of internet users are young people, and the majority of newspaper-readers are adults, it was only a logical move to make in order for the newspaper to cater for both age groups.

In the race of retaining their readership, all major newspapers and magazines today have both online and print editions. Most of their online editions are up-to-date and often provide breaking news as it happens.

For an example, Singapore’s the Straits Times has been able to increase its readership by relaunching its website. According to ST, it’s annual readership in 2008 rose to 1.44 million a day within a year of launch of its website.

But it’s not the same happy news for newspapers in the US. Outsell Inc. recently predicted steep drops in US newspapers’ print circulation as consumers continue to gravitate toward the Internet for news. The firm forecasts 3.5 percent annual declines in both daily and Sunday circulation, leading to a low of 43 million Sunday newspaper readers by 2012, compared to more than 62 million in the early 1990s.

As technology is changing the way of people consume news, and many people are shifting to get their news through modern media such as the web and mobile phones, it is important for the print media to keep going by diversifying and taking advantages of multimedia platforms.

References:

Outsell Inc. viewed 6 February 2010, http://www.directmarketingnewswire.com/2010/January/Outsell-Report-Shows-Nearly-Half-of-News-Users-Bypass-Newspaper-Sites-in-Favor-of-Google.htm.

Straits Times, viewed 6 February 2010, http://www.straitstimes.com/Breaking%2BNews/Singapore/Story/STIStory_291524.html.

Print vs online design

Anything that is a great print design is likely to be a lousy web design. There are many differences between the two media that it is necessary to take different design approaches while designing for each of them.

However, the fundamentals on design remain the same. According to Parker, good design stems from a thorough knowledge of the building blocks of graphic design and specifying them appropriately, based on the format and function of an individual project.

Whether for print or website, it is essential to give attention on clarity, organization and simplicity rather than decorating with too many colours, pictures, word arts and so on. As Parker (1990, p. 118) puts it, clarity, organization and simplicity are as critical to design as they are to writing.

• Print design is based on letting the eyes walk over the information, selectively looking at information objects and using spatial juxtaposition to make page elements enhance and explain each other.
• Web design functions by letting the hands move the information (by scrolling or clicking); information relationships are expressed temporally as part of an interaction and user movement.

Although the design ancestry is same, there are many differences between print and web. From a layout point of view, websites differ to print publications in that there are so many different elements vying for the reader's attention. Where print basically offers text and pictures, online media combines print with graphics, hyperlinks, animations and music. Since the reader has to use a multitude of senses to absorb a website, most people will tell you that the Web is much more interesting when browsing, as there is a higher level of stimulation as compared to reading print publications.

Design for webpage should achieve a balance between its attractiveness (targeted look and feel with necessary design effects) and user friendliness (easy-to-use navigation and well laid-out easily readable content)—without entirely compromising on either of them.

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Reference:

Parker, RC 1990, Beginning observations, Looking good in print: a guide to basic design for desktop publishing, 2^nd edn, Ventara Press, Chapel Hill NC.

My quest for blogging

I must say it wasn’t an easy start. Even though it was easy and fun to create a blog, I stumbled on designing, adding contents and layout. But when I surfed the HELP section, I found a whole lot of information and I became confident that I can do it.

I got fascinated by the fact that ‘web log’ or blog has already become an integral part of life for many around the world and every day over 120 thousands new blogs are created. I got even more curious about blogging trend, I found a list of important blog statistics that there are over 1.4 million new blog posts every day. More over 22 of the 100 most popular websites in the world are blogs.  

The very fact is that blogging is easier and user-friendly that goes beyond software posting and uses an entire system that allows for easy creation. You just have to write or post something, rest the system will manage for you.

I have yet to go deep into blogging, but I’m already enjoying it a lot. From my little experience and knowledge, I can tell why blogging became so popular. Today, bloggers are not only common individuals; even the mainstream media, government, businesses and celebrities are blogging or have a blog page.

For me, I do see a lot of advantages of blogging, if used it properly. I will keep you updating.

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Reference

Blogworld, 2009, viewed 29 January 2010, http://www.blogworldexpo.com/general-information/important-statistics.


Photo source: http://farm1.static.flickr.com/55/167783571_3a057e63f0.jpg.