Building and maintaining this blog brought about a mixture of feelings. On the one hand, it was stressful trying to prefect each blog post and find enough credible information to include promptly. On the other hand, I quite enjoy the stress.
Researching information for all the topics was quite enjoyable but it was extracting the right information and putting it all together that was frustrating. In fact, sometimes I found too much information and had so much to write about that it was difficult to keep within the given word limit.
Among all the other things I learnt by researching the topics in the blog posts, I have a new found respect for referencing. I realized how much time and effort it takes to pull together information and referencing is just a small form of appreciation for reproducing the work. Also, it demonstrates the authenticity of your information and enables your readers to locate your information sources (Why cite information sources? 2004).
If you didn’t know, Auto -Tune is a software program that alters singers' voices to achieve perfect pitch and when used too much it makes people sound electronic.
Usually a software that is used in the music industry and perhaps movies, it is now being used to present the news.
Auto-Tune the News, is a series of music videos on YouTube created and performed by the Gregory Brothers. The Gregory Brothers are Evan, Andrew, Michael, and Sarah Gregory (Gann 2009). They take real news broadcasts and edit them to make them funny and thus, more memorable.
Although the presentation of the news is hardly serious, it still projects the news and it is real news.
Mackey (2009) stated that they tried to mould speeches by Martin Luther King, Jr. and Winston Churchill into contemporary pop songs, it can take a while for the lyrics to sink in, but once they do, it is hard to get these weirdly catchy songs out of your head.
That way, anyone watching the videos, whether they like politics or not, will retain some information of what is happening in the news or even in history.
As The Gregory Brothers once commented, “we’ve heard some very encouraging stories from teachers and other adults who have actually used the I Have a Dream video to refresh the speech for younger ears, with great outcomes.” (Gann 2009).
It may also a form of multimodal texts that students will encounter in their educational environment (Walsh 2006). As stated by Walsh (2006), there is an increased merging of communication within and outside educational environments.
I find Auto-Tune the News very intriguing as it helps to provide news to an audience that normally would show no real interest in it but through these videos they at least are aware of certain topics. Maybe even enough to fuel further discussions about it in the future.
According to Plotkin (2010) millennials are too busy watching videos on YouTube and they typically don’t care who made those videos, or if they have an agenda, as long as the video is entertaining. Therefore, viral videos do have a have significance in presenting news to their viewers no matter the form.
Featured below is a video from the “Auto-Tune the News” series.
Walsh, M 2006, ‘The 'textual shift': examining the reading process with print, visual and multimodal texts,’ Australian Journal of Language and Literacy, vol. 29, no. 1, pp. 24-37.
This is one of the many sexist ads that were published during the recent World Cup 2010.
Source: campaignme.com
The ads above is part a campaign that plays on women’s perceived cluelessness about football, which the agency hopes will help Le Mall avoid the usual World Cup advertising clutter (Akerman 2010). Another sports season that is full of sexist ads is the SuperBowl.
SuperBowl ads are the most expensive on television, costing millions of dollars (Fredrix 2010). It contains a flurry of sexist ads with themes that varies from the popular ‘women as sex symbols’ to ‘men are stupid’.
There is usually a lot of hype and objections about ads that put a bad image on women, but not a lot is given to the ads that demoralize men. The types of advertisements that are sexist towards men are usually the ones that depict men as stupid, lazy, incompetent, or even as sex symbols.
According to Peele (2010), the impact of these ads is to give license to people - including their children - to regard and treat adult males as imbeciles.
Sweney (2009) talks about a TV campaign, for an oven cleaner called Oven Pride that was accused of implying that cleaning is women's work and that men are "stupid and lazy" when it comes to housework. He explained that most argued that the ad suggested men were "stupid and lazy" and was therefore sexist and offensive. While, the ad also suggested that cleaning was "generally a woman's job" and was therefore offensive and demeaning to women. Therefore, it seem the ad had negative depictions of both the sexes.
Below is a video that seems to encompass sexist advertising for both parties:
The most popular type of sexist adverting against women always depicts sex. Why? This is simply because sex sells. And according to Origin (2010), because usually people don't care about the product or service at first, they only care about seeing more pictures of the beautiful model in the advertisement.
Perera (2010) says that, we've largely come to accept these images as part of the landscape of modern life, images women may resent or feel intimidated by in silence but which we also fear will leave us accused of over-reaction if we voice our concerns in public.
Therefore, if we want to these types of advertisements to stop, then we simply need to make our opinion known.
The appeal of apps is obvious to anyone with an iPhone, or even one of the other smart phones (Gray 2009). Although, most who have simply held a smart phone or android have been infected with the unexplainable addiction to apps.
According to a study by Knowledge Networks, nearly 60 percent of mobile phone users carry their phones with them at all time, including at home, and a growing number say their device plays an integral part of their daily lives (Dadwal 2009). So basically an app is like a walking advertisement that is always with its target market, hence, the success rate.
In order for an app to be successful, it needs to be useful. Lardinois (2001) states that users will not be loyal to an app that is just a marketing vehicle, it need to be useful and interesting as well. Statistics say that majority of respondents (57%) noted that apps should be well designed and 74% said that they want apps to be easy to use (Lardinois 2010).
“Movie studios fully understand the influence that word-of-mouth reviews, whether positive or negative, have on box office receipts.” (Mendoza 2009).
For example, Disney Interactive Studios launched the “Alice in Wonderland – An Adventure Beyond the Mirror,” app in conjunction with the movie release.
Screenshots from Alice in Wonderland app. Source: Mobile Marketer
Stephen Saiz, director of marketing at Disney Interactive Studios, the app was “... to drive buzz and momentum for the movie by letting users watch the full trailer, download wallpapers and discover other hidden items, all within the app.”(Kats 2010).
Creating good and memorable apps will help create a relationship between the user and the brand and therefore create brand loyalty. Even if the company creates a silly and simply humorous app, it still manages to get attention and get the brand noticed (Gray 2009).
However, if these apps are too appealing, they very well could contribute to the iPhone addiction that is becoming more and more noticeable. A study by Stanford University indicates that iPhone addiction is real.
In the survey, when asked to rank their dependence on the iPhone on a scale of one to five (five being addicted and one being not at all addicted), 10 percent of the students acknowledged full addiction to the device, 34 percent ranked themselves as a four on the scale, and only 6 percent said they weren't addicted at all (Hope 2010).
Media historian Frank Luther Mott defines sensationalism as: "crime news, scandal and gossip, divorces and sex, and stress upon the reporting of disasters and sports” (Campbell 2003).
One of most sensationalized piece news this year was the WikiLeaks controversy. As posted on their website, at 5pm EST Friday 22nd October 2010 WikiLeaks released the largest classified military leak in history.
Jacinda Woodhead (2010) states that, “With the media's addiction to sensationalism... we have seemingly descended into the world of yellow journalism, so popular at the turn of the last century.”
WikiLeaks claims to be an anonymous online database designed to allow the ‘leaks’ of otherwise unavailable documents into the public arena (Nart 2010).
If this is true then I assume that the website wants to provide information to the public because they feel that they have a right to know. However, there are others besides government officials that are not happy with the leak.
A poll carried out by YouGov show that more than 40% thought that it was wrong to publish the Iraq documents, while only 34% thought that it was right.
Source: yougov.co.uk
Normally the website’s credibility would have been its main downfall, considering that it was anonymous, if it wasn’t for the fact that they collaborated with The New York Times, Der Spiegel, and The Guardian when releasing the documents (The Listening Post : WikiLeaks and the media 2010).
There is another story of how Bradley Manning, had been detained after he "boasted" in an Internet chat of leaking to WikiLeaks the now famous Apache Helicopter attack video (Greenwald 2010). Greenwald says that “...isn't it easy to see how these screeching media reports - WikiLeaks source arrested; worldwide manhunt for WikiLeaks; major national security threat - would cause a prospective leaker to WikiLeaks to think twice...”
It is hard to determine whether or not to demand that all journalistic sources be revealed or to have websites like WikiLeak continue in their quest to “reveal the truth” and “protecting their sources. As Richard (2005) states, social responsibility theory poses a number of practical dilemmas for a journalist who attempts to act in a socially responsible manner.
I personally think that any single piece information, whether anonymous or credited, should not be swallowed as a whole but instead, taken into consideration. Then that information should be compared to other sources and other viewpoint before fully believing in it.
For more on WikiLeaks:
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References
Campbell, WJ 2003, Yellow Journalism: Puncturing the Myths, Defining the Legacies, Greenwood Publishing Group, USA.
The dawn of new trends and media publishing are constantly changing the way that news is reported and presented. Nowadays, most news media have their own Twitter and Facebook accounts to support their online websites and blogs. Even CNN has a Twitter account and it is currently in the top 15 most followed on Twitter according to Twitter Counter.
Twitter is a great tool for voicing one’s thoughts and opinion and giving quick news updates. But Twitter is just another stepping tool to what is to come. According to Condron (2010), curation is currently one of "the chosen" buzz words in the social media zeitgeist.
I mentioned before about Storify. It is one of a number of “curation” services that are trying to make it easier for bloggers or journalists to pull together real-time news from Twitter and other networks and make them into a coherent narrative (Ingram 2010).
Storify Testimonials
*click to enlarge*
Testimonials on Storify say, it is said to be the future of journalism and I believe it’s true. Journalist are able to combine real time tweets from real people together with credible news sources to give readers a story with a host of multiple points of views.
So how will this affect our current news media? It doesn’t. Not really. According to Naughton (2006), the reality is that while new communications technologies may not wipe out earlier ones, they certainly change the ecosystem.
Storify can be seen as a participatory environment which breaks down the boundaries between producers and consumers and instead enables all participants to be users as well as producers of information and knowledge, as described on Produsage.org (Snurb 2007).
Storify will just provide a new form of media; it depends on how people will use it to see its affects.
Finally, below is a video on how Storify works. Enjoy.
Many have defined ‘blogging community’ in many different terms. One interesting fact is that blogs are not the community; blogs are just the tool which can help you to build community (White 2005). People have a need to connect with others and share their lives (Taricani 2007). Therefore, blogs provide a platform where we can interact with a large number of people who have common interests.
The best way to build a blogging community is to interact with the readers. Interaction is possible through comments, linking, and blogs themselves by doing reader based topics (Rowse 2009). Adding things like chat boxes, poll, quizzes, sharing links and social network links (e.g. Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, etc) can also increase interaction and traffic on the blog.
In an article by White (2006), she defined three different types of blogging communities:
1) The Single Blog/Blogger Centric Community - one blog, multiple authors, in the central blogger’s control e.g. The Knowledge Tree
2)The Central Connecting Topic Community – linked blogs, common topic, power is distributed e.g. Global Voices
3) The Boundaried Community – hosted on a single platform, denser and faster possible internal connections e.g. MySpace.com
It is a community that is based on a single platform which is Xanga. Members of that specific group/blogring are able to interact with each other and start discussion topics. This community is bound by the fact that they are all (supposedly) Taylor’s students. There are many other groups available on xanga, based on different interests. Each individual has their own weblog and they also share things like upload photos, videos, audios, share quotes, link websites, post miniblogs and more. According to White (2006), often there is more emphasis on the social connections and social networking, as evidenced by attention on who is commenting on whose blog.
Rowse, D 2009, ‘8 Tips for Building Community on Your Blog,’ Blog Tips to Help You Make Money Blogging - ProBlogger, 28 February, viewed 20 September 2010,
White, N 2006, ‘Blogs and Community – launching a new paradigm for online community?,’ The Knowledge Tree, Edition 11, September 2006, viewed 17 September, 2010,
Typical ways to categorize a blog could be by its subject matter (e.g. personal life, fashion, politics), device (moblog), media type ( e.g. vlog, linklog, tumblelogs), or status of publisher (e.g. business & corporate blogs). But one cannot define a blog by looking at one aspect it since most blogs contain many aspects.
A linklog is obsolete since the introduction of media like Facebook and Twitter. In fact, Twitter has revolutionized microblogging. According to Sussman (2009), bloggers use Twitter much more than does the general population. They use it to promote their blogs and others might use Twitter as a blogging platform by itself, updating it every day like The Diary (Simons 2008).
Source: milblogging.com
One of the key features about Twitter is the ability to link it to different applications to share things like links, pictures, and videos, very much like The Digest Blog. The Digest Blog act primarily as guides and summaries to things you can access elsewhere, either in the mainstream media or on other blogs (Simons 2008).
Something else similar to The Digest Blog is Storify. Storify uses APIs to pull in real-time data from Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, YouTube and other social networks and services, and allows bloggers or anyone else to filter by keyword and then simply drag and drop the content from those services into a story template (Ingram 2010). Basically, you tell stories with other people’s point of view.
In my opinion, this will soon be a new tool that will again revolutionize the blogosphere and might even bring about a totally new classification of blog.
A blogosphere is basically made up of all blogs and their interconnections. These interconnections include online services such as Twitter and YouTube. By 2007, Technorati has tracked over 70 million weblogs with about 120,000 new weblogs being created around the world every day (Sifry 2007).
The graph below shows the number of blog as tracked by Technorati from March of 2003 to March of 2007.
Image source: www.sifry.com
So what are all these people blogging about?
Apparently, based on a survey by Technorati (Sussman 2009), the top five topics that bloggers blog about are : - Technology - Politics - Business - News - Personal Musings. And based on the survey, only a small percentage of them were from the Asia Pacific (APAC), which is 10%.
Image source: Technorati
In 2007, Gaman compiled a list of the Top 50 Most Influential Blogs in Malaysia. Of those top 50, - 28% of them wrote about personal stuff - 16% wrote about politics and technology respectively This is just a rough estimate of what goes on in the blogs of Malaysian but it is an insight nonetheless.
Blogs are gaining more and more ground as a serious source of information. A prime example was during the Iranian elections. Iran banned journalists from moving around the country and blocked Facebook, Twitter, and many other popular websites (Hughes & Kellman 2009). As a result, many turned to blogs as a source of news on the topic.
In Malaysia, blogs have a significant ability to dodge censorship. The government control that is imposed on most journalists and newspaper has caused most to doubt the reliability of the mainstream media in Malaysia (Travis 2008). Therefore, most look to online and foreign news sources, including blogs, to get the full story and even stories that weren’t even reported. Blogs give an opportunity for local journalist to write stories that they normally might not be able to for a newspaper. Also, readers are able to get much wanted local perspectives and discuss on issues that are occurring around Malaysia.
Blogs have crossed that line from being an insignificant online trend to being a powerful source of information. For that reason, the blogosphere will continue to grow in number and importance, providing a larger ground for bloggers all around the world.
Based on presentation slides used for a group presentation, I will discuss on what can be improved. The slides were very simple; mostly words and two pictures were used. One of the tips for a successful presentation (n.d.) is combining photos, charts and graphs and even embedding digitized videos with text, will add variety and keep your audience interested in the presentation. Therefore, to improve the presentation, more visual examples should have been used.
Example of the slide with pictures.
According to Putnis and Petelin (1996), It is important to align all the elements on each page (or slide) orderly. Below is an example of a presentation slide that is not properly aligned and therefore more difficult to read.
Slide with messy text placement.
The slide also seems too cluttered. This is also a bad example as Reep (2006) describes that white space is actually the most important format element because, without it, most readers would quickly give up trying to get information from a document.
In terms of content, some of the points can be difficult to understand if you are not familiar with the topic. A piece of advice given by Sandman (2008) is ‘Don’t use jargon to impress. If you can live without the word, cut it. If you absolutely need to use it, define it.’
Lastly, there shouldn’t be too many slides in a presentation, so it is important to make slides as efficiently as possible (Marquez n.d.). There were 20 slides in the total presentation. Fewer would have been better.
The entire presentation had 20 slides.
When giving a presentation, the purpose would be to present information to your audience. Therefore, it is important that that information is presented clearly and efficiently through an easily understandable presentation. If that is achieved, then it should be counted as a success.
Sandman, PM, 2008, Simplification Made Simple, The Peter M. Sandman Risk Communication Website, viewed 28 August 2010, <http://www.psandman.com/col/simplify.htm>.
