E-tivity 2: Blogs

What is a weblog? How should it be organized? How should I use it and its contents? In order to understand these things I went to blog search engine Technorati to seek and check few blogs. I used tags like travel, comic, humour, news, books, life, music and movie. I've come across different types of blogs that sometimes surprised me for the way they were structured. Before then, I thought blogs had a proper layout in which posts and comments alternate and links and photos were added if needed. The Things We Think but Do Not Say is the easiest example of what I mean. In this blog people write short stories – according to the rules of flash fiction style –. For this reason, the words of posts are the very important thing. Within the texts photos and links are not put because they are not necessary. Of course, if you like reading, you should visit this blog and eventually leave your comment.

More complex is Treehugger. It is an on-line magazine in which posts seem to be articles on different topics such as cars+transportation, culture+celebrities, travel+nature, business+politics and others. Posts are centrally set. As a rule, links within the text of the posts have to do with other web sites, blogs, articles, photos and word meanings.

Many blogs are concerned with web marketing strategies, new technologies, people’s thoughts or news. However, typing gift in Technorati, I’ve found Gift Rap whose self-definition tells us it is 'a shopping blog of cool gift ideas[...]'. Depending on the occasion, the person and the category of the object you’ve in mind, Gift Rap suggests you what you should buy to give to someone the best present. Here, posts consist in blog masters’ tips and blog rules allows you to ask more. About secrets I've found two completely different but both very interesting blogs. The first one is Whisperasecret.com where people posts about their secret feelings and thoughts. Posts have no links and language is informal with abbreviations and emoticons. I'd like you to visit Post Secret because it shows us a very peculiar way to set a blog. Posts are not properly written but represented by hand-made postcards on which people puts a message. It's an artlog (see link above 'weblog'). lolcats 'n' funny pictures - I Can Has Cheezburger? is another artlog where members put mostly funny photos with cats and these images are filled with short writings. Here the language style is the most informal so far because grammar rules are not respected and people use slang to express themselves. (Click here to see Commonly-Used American Slang).

Summing up my observations I can say that in a blog:

- You should write with a formal language if your blog deals about news and short stories. The same if you want to give your blog a more elegant touch. In order to have a more effective and direct approach to the blog reader, news can also be written with the style used for newspaper headlines, especially if your posts are short and frequently updated.

- You can write with an informal language if your blog deals with your thoughts, ideas, photos. Also use it if your target is youth and you want to be more funny and confidential.

- If the whole text is written black on white background words shouldn’t be coloured and underlined unless they are links. Posts should have links in order to make the text and its meaning clearer.

- Within blog texts photos are usually small. In case, they can be enlarged by clicking on them.

- People do not sign when posting (because the name appears automatically) and use avatars or small images to represent themselves. Click here to create an avatar from a photo of yours!

Photo above by Cayusa.