My Feeling towards Blogging

If somebody asks me, ‘Do you have a blog?’, I can answer confidently, ‘Yes!’. I don’t know why I’m so proud of having my own blog, maybe because I have my own space to share my thoughts to the whole world, and I feel so pleased when I received some comments from my classmates. I think this is why people love to continue writing their blogs. I’m glad that I have chosen this as my university language fulfilling course because I can have a taste of creating my own blogs, making the remix, videos and games. I think I would never learn this skill after my graduation (I’m already a final year student.) Learning how to write for the new media makes me feel that I seemed to know nothing before. But now, I’m confident to tell others I know something about blogging.

Evaluation of my best blog

In the following, I will use one bad example, “A Thoughtful Thought of Recent Talk”, and one best one, “Online Game, a Space?!”, to illustrate how I make my progress during the past six weeks.

In the “A Thoughtful Thought of Recent Talk”, as at that time, I was not so familiar with how to write a blog. I just wrote my reflections on the lecture, and came up with my views on the three areas, ‘multimodality’, ‘different types of layouts for certain kinds of web pages’, and ‘be critical for hyperlinks’. But after another lecture, I found that there were too many aspects, pictures, hypertexts, and words in one single post, which lost the focus.

I want to make an improvement! I want to avoid the above mistakes! And here is my best post: “Online Game, a Space?!” Why I choose this as my sample post because I think this topic is interesting to grab people’s attention. I've also applied the knowledge learnt during class, like participatory culture, online affinity space, externalities, social languages and online identity. I also avoid making the same mistakes, like last time. I think this is my best post after all.

For my first evaluation, I think ‘online game’ might somehow encourage people to continue reading my post as it’s not a too heavy topic and it’s quite interesting I guess, which can grab people’s attention, and I deliberately used some questions at the beginning to trigger people’s response. This time, I only focus on one particular topic, which is more focused and detailed. For my second point, I have applied the learnt knowledge in this blog. The most obvious one are participatory culture and online affinity spaces, because I want to share these two concepts to the online- game addicted. As what I think is you can know more about why you have such behavior, and not just only play the game. I tried to write in an informal way, so that my readers might not stop reading it because of the serious tone.

Another thing I've learnt is externalities, like the hypertexts and images. I didn't overuse them this time because I have learnt a lesson before. As a reader, too many external resources wouldn't help boost the quality of the blog, but really discourage him/her to click on them. Also, I have attributed the images to the origin, so that I will not infringe the copyright (I seemed to violate the law in my first entry.) Being too lengthy isn't good, as people are not expected to read thousands of words in a blog and this time I think it’s appropriate.

More than that, I have used some social languages, for example ‘haha~’ and all the short forms to lessen the seriousness of the tone. For the online identity, I think I have demonstrated as a student to share something I've learnt to the readers, but not like a lecture. It also shows that I’m a social science student as my blog’s format is probably like a research paper, like my research question: to examine why online game players are always being addicted, by illustrating the concepts and applying some examples.

My feeling towards blogging

I think it’s quite difficult to write a good blog because it’s hard to criticize the new media in a unique and interesting angle Therefore, we dare have to compete with others; otherwise no one would like to read your post as it’s so ordinary among all ordinary posts. More than that, how to write in a way to prompt readers to respond is a big question. I think your own popularity deserves much and I think the number of comments and views are somehow an indicator to reflect whether you have written a good blog or not.

My initial impression towards blogs is something like Xanga (I used it during my secondary school life to just record what I’d done during the day), which I think exactly is a ‘Hi Diary’ book, but in an electronic version. However, after six lectures of introducing what blogging is, I changed my mind of the concept of blogging, as blogs, including Xanga, are definitely much more than just a physical diary. They can be like feature articles or advertisements, as we can promote some products underneath, for example some tips of make-up (somehow these kind of sharing might be fake though). Besides, we can also express our thoughts on current news. But what is the difference between writing in the letter to the editor and blogs? Probably the tone should be softer in blogs because it should be so relaxing when reading blogs; people are not supposed to read a heavy piece.

What’s more? Giving feedback and receiving comments from others are very pleasurable because you know at least somebody is reading your blog and you don’t know where the power crops up to urge you continue writing your blogs. Being interactive is, therefore, the soul of blogging. The followings are some links that I have commented on my classmates’ blogs:

                                                                                                

Chan Chi Hin's blogs: my digital live 3, my digital life 4 and this is my blog

Connie Wong: digital life, commercials-attracting audience and Collaborative projects

Marques Fields: My digital life, skype and  Even Apple's not Perfect

Kelvin Fok: Urban Dictuionary, Internaet Privacy: Think before You Post,How Does Collaborative New Media Influence Journalism and A Period for this Blog Assignment

By the way, I love writing blogs as I can share what I love to my readers, and I feel more satisfied when I received people’s comments. Thanks for exploiting this space for all the people in the 21^st century to enjoy such ‘freedom of speech’, no matter who you are, which ethnic groups you belong to and which part of the world you are in.  Blogging! Hurray!