Blogs Phenomenon

Nowadays, there are many blogs created everyday. Blogs have introduced a myraid of new voices to the channels of information exchange online. People who "Blog" are called Bloggers, and there are hundreds, thousands of Blogs on the Net today.

The blogosphere is an extensive conversation that's playing a rising role in creating trends, reporting news and opinion, and generating buzz. (Nelson, 2006) There are some 9 million blogs out there, with 40,000 new ones popping up each day. Many blogs include links, or underlined words that, when clicked, carry readers to other Web pages. (Pinto, 2005)

Besides, blogs are beginning to demand big readerships and some even gain revenue by selling their own advertising space. Rhodes University New Media studies head, Vincent Maher (2006), says blogs are a communication revolution allowing people to converse across national and cultural boundaries and become part of a new global public sphere that wasn’t available to readers otherwise. “Blogging is a lot of fun and many people have started doing it. It’s practically part of the social fabric of the web now. The excitement is largely due to the way it gives ordinary people cheap and easy-to-use communication tools for potentially mass audiences without the supervision of an editor,” says Maher.

However, blogging brought a lot of benifits to community. Blogs created many important and new opportunities for publishers. Publishers may view blogs as just another source of competiton for readers. Bloggers can act as a fliter for the information online, making it interesting and unique new voices in the blogosphere. (Nelson, 2006) Blogs are low-cost channel for book publicity and advertising. Book publishers are taking advantage of these opportunities and even launching their own blogs to connect and communicate with audiences. (Nelson, 2006)

In conclusion, blogging could be an efficient and effective alternative for information and knowledge transfer, resulting in a more productive workforcein libraries.





Reference Lists:

1. Dvorak, J, C 2002, The Blog Phenomenon, viewed on 12 June 2009, http://www.pcmag.com/
   
2. Nelson, M 2006, The blog phenomenon and the book publishing industry, Springer New York.
   
3. Pinto, J 2005, Blog phenomenon all around, viewed on 14 June 2009, http://www.isa.org/

Document Design

This posting will discuss about what is a good document and talk about the good writing for presentation.

Documents are used by people in several countries and continents for communicating and collaborating. A design document is a way for you to communicate with others what your design decisions are and why your decisions are good decisions. The major factor that determines if your design document is good is whether or not it clearly explains your intentions. Document design is including elements that are relevant to different contexts and coding the document to allow elements to display or not, as appropriate. (Lynch & Horton, N.D.) Diagrams are a nice tool for visualizing your design, but it cannot convey the motivation behind your design decisions. That's why it is so important to let diagrams supplement your design document, not be your design document. (Hackett, 2007)

In my group presentation earlier, our slides are just list out the point and didn't do a diagram to elaborate and also overlook our document design. Therefore, I think our presentation is seem to be so boring. Yet after starting to do this weblog, I just realised the design is so important. I will do more research and practice to improve myself in this aspect.

Credibility is important for Web users nowadays. It can be increased by high-quality graphics, good writing, and use of outbound hypertext links. (Nielsen, J 1997) So that, a good writing will permit your readers to concentrate on your ideas, and may help you to give the impression that you know what you are talking about. Good scientific and technical writing should written for a direct and specified purpose that remain unchanged and conveyed without information loss, regardless of its audience. (Rothman, S 2005) Scientific writing should focus equally on both the empirical evidence and the rational or logic behind the meaning attached to the results. (Rothman, S2005)

reference lists:

1. Hackett, S 2007, How to Write an Effective Design Document, viewed 6 April 2009, <http://blog.slickedit.com/?p=43>
   
2. Lynch & Horton, N.D., Document Design, viewed 6 April 2009, <http://webstyleguide.com/wsg3/7-page-design/2-document-design.html>
   
3. Nielsen, J 1997, How Users Read on the Web, viewed 5 April 2009, <http://www.useit.com/alertbox/9710a.html>
   
4. Rothman, S 2005, What Makes Good Scientific and Technical Writing?, viewed 5 April 2009, <http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/9447/error?cat=4>

purpose

The purpose that I open this weblog is to discuss about the issue related to publication and design. Very welcome to those who are interested with this aspect and shares same interest and concern about these issues. I would like to make this weblog more interesting:)