Sunday, 17 March 2013

Reflection On Blogs, Blogging and Blogger


Source: Beaverspondpress; accessed on 17 March 2013

What is a blog? Considering that there is a wide range of definitions of this term, starting with the earliest reference seems appropriate.

So, how did it all start?


1994 – College student, Justin Hall, marks his presence on the web with personal homepage – Links.net.
1997 – The term "weblog" has been introduced following influential Jorn Barger’s journal on “Robot Wisdom”. It was created to reflect the process of logging the web as he browsed.
1998 – First blog on the news site (Jonathan Dube blogs Hurricane Bonnie for The Charlotte Observer).
1999 – “Weblog” has been shortened to “blog” by programmer Peter Merholz.

LiveJournal was one of the first blogging platforms, followed by the Blogger, responsible for introducing blogging to the mainstream.

Blogs had been popularised in the 2000s, in so called “growth period”, with the rise of political online journals, and began to be widely used by the general public just a few years ago. To add the “social feel” to the idea of traditional blogging, the term “microblogging” had been established with Tumblr, which allows its users to format their posts and enhance them with various media tools as well as “reblog” the content of others.


Bright future of blogging?


Just a few statistics on blogging worldwide created last year:
State of the blogging world; source: Blogging.org, accessed on 17 March 2013

According to the research conducted in 2012 by the University of Massachusetts, blogging is in decline as a result of “easier management of social media sites”.
"This study indicates that there is now support for the proposition that the use of blogging may have peaked as a primary social media tool in the US business world. The new data shows adoption of blogging is declining for the first time since 2007 among the Inc. 500 companies." (here)
I think the 2013 will face further decrease in blogging, however in “prehistoric” meaning of this term.

With conjunction with major social networking sites, such as Facebook or Twitter, blogs have now become a powerful platform for expressing ideas and sharing them with the rest of the world. I think that blogs constitute a great future particularly for education. School students may take notes in the form of online journals, which they could decide to share with their peers (privacy options are available). They may embed social media sites, to ask quick questions or link their work. Facebook or Twitter could easily play the role of a promoting tool. Could you imagine fitting this post in a Facebook status? 

Blogs seem to be more knowledge-reflection based compared to other popular social media sites. They are more sophisticated, easier to customise in a way that we could adjust their template and layout to suit our taste, as well as add photos, videos, podcasts and embed a number of widgets allowing to express ourselves better.

Potential Of Blogs In Teaching Context (SWOT Analysis)


SWOT, source: I-swot; accessed on 17 March 2013

In the past, to create a “fancy” blog meant to possess a set of skills acquired over the years in programming. These days anyone can do it! Talking about “a particular set of skills”, I couldn’t resist sharing this classic movie scene with you:


References:
  • Wagner, A. (2012). A Corrective To Bad Journalism; The Bureau of Investigative Journalism. Retrieved on March 17, 2013, from http://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/2012/10/16/a-corrective-to-bad-journalism/



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6 comments:

  1. Oliver Skrzypczynski17 March 2013 at 20:16

    I like the information background. I didn't know exactly where the Blog term came from.

    I agree that Blogs are a more sophisticated in their ability to convey more information.

    Do you think another platform may come out the uses the control of a blog with the connected nature of a social media site. or is that here already with RSS feeds?

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    Replies
    1. Unknown18 March 2013 at 06:06

      I think a couple of alternatives already exist, Tumblr being one of them. Considering rapidly changing technologies, I think there is a possibility that in the next couple of years blogs will be replaced with another platform combining the ideas of online journal + social media. On the other hand, blogs could be taken to a higher, more technologically advanced level and who knows, maybe we wouldn't be calling them "blogs" anymore?

      Delete
  2. Unknown23 March 2013 at 23:08

    Your reflection on blogs was very insightful. I feel like I've learnt so much about the origins, trends and ever changing nature of blogging. I am curious though.. I myself have a scoop.it account but haven't been able to add it as a gadget. Any advice on how to do it?

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    Replies
    1. Unknown24 March 2013 at 01:20

      Thank you, Erin :)
      Go to http://www.scoop.it/goodies, here you can chose the number of slides you want (scoops), adjust the width, speed, etc. For that you must have your own topic created. Once you've finished, press the "Finish and Grab the Code" button and copy the code.
      Then go to your blog, Layout -> Add a gadget -> HTML/Java Script -> you can pick the title (you don't have to though) + paste the code in the blank box underneath -> SAVE :)

      Delete
  3. Unknown24 March 2013 at 01:22

    Here's a good step by step video -->http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7kE_kyXao_o

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  4. Unknown30 March 2013 at 16:17

    Thanks so much Urszula! I keep getting a broken link error. The video was very helpful too :)

    ReplyDelete

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