Introduction

What is Blogging?
Blogging is a website where entries are written in chronological order and displayed in reverse chronological order.

“Blogging is an exciting and innovative tool for weblogs. It is your key to easy publishing on the World Wide Web – you can share pictures, video, links, documents, newsletters, opinions and more, with family, friends and colleagues. Now you can have a website without being a Webmaster!” (Blogging.com)

In Malaysia, bloggers normally use blogs as their personal diaries where the postings are about their daily life and the “unknown” area of the blogger.

Purposes behind Blogging Activity & Blogs Classifications
Blogs include a wide range of genre where it includes commentary or news on a particular subject such as food, politics, fashion, law, engineering, certain interest, or maybe some function as more personal online diaries. First, blogs started with only texts but after 10 years of advancement and development, the types or the content of blogs have developed into various types that not only contain texts but also images, videos, music and other mediums.

Most of these bloggers used blogs as a communication channel to communicate with their friends and families. Some bloggers used their blogs for small business where they promote their dresses, accessories and etc. Also, some bloggers start their blogs with some interests and seek for members to join them for discussion and share thoughts and passions.

I personally think that blogs are not a waste of time. With blogs, I can communicate with my friends and family, perhaps make friends from there. Blogs allow people around to know you more and for instance, I can update my friend and family’s news.

Most blogs are primarily textual, but now blogs has various types. The types of blogs available are personal blogs, business and corporate blogs, family blogs, artlog, photoblog, sketchblog, video blogs (vlog), music blogs (MP3 blog), audio blogs and many more.

Blogging Community
There are a few blogging communities, namely Blogspot, Live Journal, Xanga, I’m Vlog, Lifelogger, Multiply and many more.

Communities form around this shared interest and the stronger groups turn interest into a passion. Bloggers need to subscribe to a blogging community so that they belonged to them and get connected with other bloggers and blog community linked them up with common interest, called the “blogspheres”. In the blogsphere, bloggers can exchange thoughts, discuss similar topics and etc.

Designing for Online vs Print
Nielsen (1997) suggested three main guidelines for writing for the web:-
(i) Be succinct – Brief, Clear and Concise.
(ii) Write for scannability – Meaningful and highlighted headlines, coloured keywords, underline and etc
(iii) Make use of hypertext structure – spilt information into consistent chucks with each containing a focal point

Differences of online and print designs
Writing for print and writing for web is very different.
Printing uses 2-dimensional design format while web uses 1-dimensional or N-dimensional format. The scrolling, hypertexting and navigation bars are the main navigation for web users while page-turning acts as navigation in the print. Print emphasizes high-impact visualization whereas multimedia elements are main focus in web. These multimedia elements are to keep users and engage them with interactions.

References:

Morkes, K. & Nielson, J. 1997, Concise, Scannable, and Objective: How to Write for the Web [Online, accessed on 1 June 2007]

URL: http://www.useit.com/papers/webwriting/writing.html

Nielson, J. 1997, 'Be Succinct! '(Writing for the Web) [Online, accessed on 1 June 2007

URL: http://www.useit.com/alertbox/9703b.html

Nielson, J. 1999, Differences Between Print Design and Web Design [Online, accessed on 1 June 2007]

URL: http://www.useit.com/alertbox/990124.html,