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This short essay is about the choices and the decision making process that I have made in the creation of this site or node as part of my web presence. I will also discuss some of my learning’s from this specific unit. Two comments about blogs helped me put blogs, blogging and the blogosphere into perspective. They were comments by Bob Walsh (2007) about the Attention Economy, where it’s about the me factor or ”people showing off to get attention”. His counter point is a blog site created by Renee that is devoted to helping wives of serving Los Angeles Police Department officers. The site LAPD Wives is located at http://www.lapdwife.com/ and shows how blogs can be used with common sense and care to help and enrich others.
The second difference can be highlighted by the comment “But there’s a problem. We’re heading toward a world where an extensive trail of information fragments about us will be forever preserved on the Internet, displayed instantly in a Google search” (Solove, 2007, p.17). I have had to weigh up my need for my privacy and what I was posting and blogging with the need to learn and achieve a positive result from my learning. This will be an ongoing balance for me as I find this balance difficult to achieve as opposed to the 140 character generation.
This has been my second foray into creating a blog. I was not aware of the criteria and how’s and whys until I completed a recent module of Internet Studies titled Blogging. This has been a brand new experience for me, not only increasing technical understanding of blogging, but some of the issues surrounding this as well. The process to find, sort, setup and make work in a partial fashion has been an interesting objective in how diverse the information from the internet can be. An example is that a recent search on Yahoo for “3 column blogger templates” returns over 1,430,000 hits. Where to begin?, What do I want to achieve?, How do I achieve this have been some of the questions that I have grappled with over the last several weeks.
As a first step I reread my journal notes on Blogging, refreshing my understanding of how it fits with Web 2 technologies and what my real need was for this. Did I want something special or just to fit the parameters of the assignment? Wordpress was my first choice as an application to host my blog. I planned to become competent with the technologies by creating a blog for my online portfolio and to self teach the hows. This choice was made in part due to searches that had more Wordpress and more commentary about Wordpress from the Discussion board. Most web searches additionally indicated that Wordpress allowed greater flexibility and usability. My first blog can be found at http://lodestar01.wordpress.com, with a number of wasted hours as I tried different styles, templates, gadgets etc. This blog provided lots of insights as I attempted to add various links, or nodes, such as Twitter or Facebook. There were a number of questions and a little angst about Wordpress and how difficult it can be to use (as with any new product) on the discussion board and in my experience. Based on this I then made the decision to use Blogger, another Web 2 application, and found that this was much easier to learn and use.
Web 2 and the associated new technologies are interesting. I thought for a long while about what secondary nodes I would share with my blog. I decided on several, for various reasons. Facebook as I’m keen for my friends to be part of this. Flickr as this application really excites me as it allows sharing of image content in a much easier and end user friendly way than iStock and finally Twitter. “Ahh to tweet or not to tweet”. I’m not a big fan of this, even though I’ve joined and attempted to use. I like my conversation to last more than 140 characters and, really, I have better things to do with my time than look and post on twitter. Great potential for this application as an interactive site on various levels – learning, news, public announcements etc.
One of my major issues has been how to cross link my nodes, as well as privacy concerns. Although I’m using several secondary nodes, not all link back (and I’ve not been able to work out the how/why of that). My concern with privacy is that some of these additional nodes are for different parts of my life style – Linkedin for business/professional reasons, Flickr for my passion (newly discovered) of photography through to Facebook for interaction with friends and family. Not all mutually compatible reasons, and honestly, perhaps not a good fit with the blog.
I have learned a lot about internet communications and tools within this module and from the notes and comments from other learners and the tutors on the discussion board. It has given me a greater appreciation of what is and can be within this environment and, importantly, how I can use and interact with others on sites such as blogs and various social networks. The various additional nodes and widgets that I’ve used on this blog are a reflection of me (potentially increasing my shadow or footprint) and how I view those applications and sources that are usable and important to me.
References
Solove, D. (2007). The future of repetition: gossip, rumor, and privacy on the internet. USA: Vail-Ballou Press.
Walsh, B. (2007). Clear Blogging: How people are changing the world and how you can join them. New York, NY: Springer-Verlan
