Blog Reflection

For my first time creating a blog, I am extremely proud of the finished project. My design is fairly simplistic, but it is one of the strengths of the blog. I chose a uniform layout for each post on top of a background of warm colored water colored art work. I customized the layout to make it as user friendly as possible with a table of contents on the right hand side. A potential revision would be a bigger “about me” section if I decide to keep up my blog. I chose to keep it basic so that it would look more professional for the class. I really am pleased overall with the way it looks and am proud of my first blog whenever I click on the page. It was more difficult than I thought to create the blog, but I actually enjoyed it. Although my posts responding to class readings were mainly oriented towards the actual reading and not my own opinions, I was able to relate to them. In the reading “What we’re doing when we blog” author Meg Hourihan states that you learn about yourself when you blog because you choose how you desire to present yourself. This is very true, and was also a challenge I encountered. I had to find a happy medium between how I wanted to present my feedback on the readings and how much I wanted to talk about my future career. I tried to experiment with embedding videos, creating hyperlinks, and inserting a poll into my blog posts. I created a poll but could not get the HTML code to work unfortunately. If I had three more weeks to work on the blog, I would have continued to try to incorporate a poll into my blog, and make the responses longer. However, the brevity of all of my blogs is also a strength because I won’t lose a reader’s attention with a short and sweet post. The three most important changes I made were the background, the layout, and the making sure the font was uniform. These all added to the aesthetic appeal and were important for the blog to be cohesive and were extremely important because they created more of a theme and expressed my own taste. I am generally a simplistic, easygoing person and my blog shows that. When deciding how much input to give about my future career, I learned exactly how confident I felt about my future career when writing the posts. The fact that digital advertising and media relations are essential to virtually any business, and my career could easily correlate to any of the blog posts reassured me that I chose a major that is relevant and necessary to business. I also learned that I need to focus on specifics while writing .I struggled on finding a balance of how depth I should go for each question. I did learn that I have an eye for balance as my blog layout is cohesive and the images are all sized to be similar. If I had to grade my blog I would give myself an A. My posts are brief but to the point, my design and overall theme give a glimpse of myself, and I certainly utilized various forms of media with the inclusion of videos, images, hyperlinks, and digital design. 

Everything Old Becoming New- Grohol

Ironically, Grohol  chose to criticize an author our class has read before, Meg Hourihan. He disagrees with her “tunnel vision” and close-minded opinion of blogs.  Grohol regards blogs as a necessary part of the internet and hopes they become mainstream rather than viewed as an annoyance. The numbers make it clear that blogs are mainstream with the top popular blog, Huffington Post, receiving a whopping fifty four million visits per month. They are a business tool just as much as a social outlet. Many businesses incorporate blogs as marketing tools to alert the public about their progress. The title of the blog is very fitting to my future career. Technology is more popular and utilized more frequently than ever. A quote that stuck out to me was "everything unique is something old repositioned" because creativity is not truly unique, it is borrowed. Inspiration must come from somewhere and build off of something that already exists. 

Weblogs: A History & Perspective - Bloods

The idea of blogging originated in the 1990’s and has grown since. There are hundreds of blogging platforms in existence, and most are free. The options are endless to customize and share blogs, or keep them private like a diary. In the article “Weblogs: a history and perspective” Rebecca Blood examines the idea of self-actualization through blogging. She has a point considering your blog is a representation of yourself just as much as it showcases your writing. This same idea is important in advertising. The point of an ad is to create a certain appealing image that will encourage others to want a product or service. Blogs can be utilized to do just that, and are considered a PR tool, necessary for advertising.

What we're doing when we blog- Hourihan

Author of "What we're doing when we blog" Meg Hourihan gives her opinion of blogging without bashing it in an obnoxious way. Many people are quick to criticize blogging, but Hourian recognizes that blogs are as unique as the people who write them. One thing all blogs do have in common though is the format. Hourhian makes a valid point that whether you are blogging about other blogs with negative comments, or simply blogging about our personal life, you are still using the same format and encounter the same options of sharing. Although blogs were originally started as an online diary, they are now a business tool. For example, a celebrity blog could easily endorse any product, creating free advertising. Many celebrities are given free products in order to be seen with them or discuss them to gain exposure. 

Blogging can be used in a matter of ways, and as Hourihan puts it, "As with free speech itself, what we say isn't as important as the system that enables us to say it." 

How Youtube Matters- Burgess

The article by Burgess, "How Youtube Matters" is quite intriguing to ponder. How did society share and watch videos before Youtube launched? I certainly can't recall. I also blame Youtube for apps that incorporated video sharing. Vine, a 16 second maximum video sharing application, and Instagram videos, 30 second maximum videos on a picture sharing app, probably would not have existed if the video sharing interface had not become so popular. It is now an overwhelming website with over 100 hours of video uploaded every MINUTE.  Youtube is not only widely used, but can be turned into profit with over a thousand Youtube channels making six figures a year via digital advertising, my future career.

Pencils to Pixels- Barrons

When was the last time you composed writing with simply a pencil and paper? Chances are that it has been a while with all of the digital technologies we are constantly exposed to. A quintessential example of pencils to pixels is the website “Gutenberg Project”. This website converts classical works of literature such as “Alice in Wonderland” into free, online PDFs. This advancement of digitalizing everything goes hand in hand with society’s participatory culture. This culture allows us to share many forms of media rapidly, and share our thoughts on them. 

Below is a link to the Gutenberg Project where you can access over 42,000 free ebooks:
Click here for free e-books!

The Psychology of Blogs- Grohol

Published in 2002, Grohol expresses the lost art of blogging. I found it ironic that eleven years ago he felt that blogging was less personal becoming increasingly mainstream. Since this article, blogging has just become more popular. He also examines the brevity of blogs, and criticizes them for not being well written. I disagree with Grohol’s opinion that short blogs aren’t effective because I believe our impatient society doesn’t desire to take the time to read a longer article. In my future career in marketing and sales, I will be required to compose concise and effective sales pitches, supporting the idea of brevity in writing.