Professional Documents
Culture Documents
The task that we were set at the beginning of the subject was to
‘craft a specific online presence’. This has involved developing a
specific persona around a personal interest, fictitious character or
other such appropriate theme. Bloghosting websites have catered to
this task with their adaptability, customisation options and ease of
content creation. Other platforms like Google Sites offer a more
complete and flexible solution in terms of content and appearance.
However Google Sites also requires a higher level of technical
knowledge and expertise than many bloghosting websites. After
exploring both methods of producing an online persona I aim to
critically reflect on which has provided a better outcome for my
online project.
From the outset this project was daunting and without careful
planning I realised my project could very quickly fall behind
schedule. With this in mind I decided to focus on something that I
already took part in on a regular basis, which was music. This
proved to be a simple and flexible subject, but I focused my content
on one particular aspect of my musical interest. Triple J Unearthed is
an online band comp, run by radio station Triple J. It dedicates itself
to ‘unearthing’ new bands and allows them to host their songs for
free on the Unearthed site. Being an avid listener of Triple J and a
constant reviewer on Triple J Unearthed I started to formulate ideas
on how I could incorporate my passion into my class project.
The availability of free and easy to use bloghosting sites has spurred
the growth of the blogosphere. Sites like Wordpress, Blogger and
Tumblr have helped the number of blogs to grow from 53 million in
2007 to 212 million today (Keen, 2007). I chose to use Tumblr as the
platform for my blog, And For Tonight’s Main Act, where I could
review bands, songs and related media that appeared on
Unearthed. I felt that Tumblr offered the best content flexibility and
ease of use, while its content creation process was simple and
straightforward. Also it meant that I could actively look for and
participate in communities related to my theme and topic. This is a
great advantage of bloghosting sites, the ability for communities to
join with each other, snowballing their membership and
participation rate in an easy to use environment.
Updating ‘And For Tonight’s Main Act’ daily worked well, my own
style and preferences came to the fore and represented my
personal taste in music. I had comments from people liking the
content and the number of people listening to the music I had
posted was going up, counted on an online music player embedded
into the blog. However, the daily updates soon stopped and I found
myself bored by the lack of overall variety in content and content
delivery. I found that although content en mass is visually appealing
and can attract a large group of followers, it takes a large amount of
time and effort to maintain such a site, an amount that proved too
much for me provide.