Reflection

Reflecting upon my COMM1043 experience, there are many things I have learnt in process, first of all is the creation of this blog of course, which is new to me. Then it not only taught me on how to make blogs, but how to design it properly. In making this blog I attempted to apply a few principles of design; the main ones are the application of theories regarding composition, salience, and framing by Kress van Leeuwen (2006) to provide a better reading experience.

I also kept in mind the theory as according to Walsh(2006) that every reader would have a different interpretation, and tried to apply it by trying to imagine a reader’s perspective to my publications. Asides from publication theories, I have also learnt so much from all the reading research materials I did for the sake of the blog, which I am sure will be useful for me in the future.

Well, that’s it from me, I hope that upon reading this blog you might stumble across anything interesting or useful, I truly enjoyed all the learning process, this is my first blog but maybe it’s not my last ;).

I had fun, thanks for reading guys!

REFERENCE LIST:

Walsh. M. 2006, “‘Textual shift’: Examining the reading process with print, visual and multimodal texts”, Australian Journal of Language and Literacy, Vol. 29, No. 1, p.24-37

Kress, G. & van Leeuwen, T. 2006, 'Chapter 1: The semiotic landscape: language and visual
communication' in Reading images: the grammar of visual design, 2dn edn, Routledge, London.

Emoticons & Email Etiquette : How digital communication could distort an expression

The means and ways people can communicate in this digital age is extremely broad, while this is all good and convenient for us living in the information highway, there are some flaws as to how digital communication is conveyed. As according to Walsh, (2006) a text can convey many different ideas depending on the audience background.

-Windows Live Messenger and Windows Live Hotmail almost every college student these days is familiar with these methods of communication

The problem with these digital methods is, they don’t carry over the rich and broad range of expressions that makes up real life speech and conversation. Furthermore different people tend to interpret an email differently and some are unaware of this fact, thinking everyone must have the same interpretation, thus leading to miscommunication and trouble.

Paul Nelson (2009) mentions a recent survey of US companies revealed that 31% of the surveyed U.S companies have terminated an employee for e-mail related issues. 9% because of blogs.

An Idea of a solution

“Emoticon”, said to be invented by Professor Fahlman in Carnegie Mellon University, was originally invented to address online jokes and make it that much less ambiguous.

“made by typing a colon, a hyphen, then a parenthesis; :-) –the first form of emoticon?”

For those of you who love the convenience of online communications, especially chatting programs such as MSN and MIRC, you should be familiar with these cute little faces.

Picture of Msn Emoticons

-emoticons can be as simple as “:)” “:(” , or maybe something more complicated like “(-_-)”, and even more such as these expressions on MSN Messenger

Imagine these examples of a common phrase in the end of an email:

“Please help me”

“Please help me :(”

While it is arguable that different people would interpret this differently. I think most of us can agree that adding the little smiley face in the end would insinuate the atmosphere of a more “friendly request for help”, at the very least, it would sound less serious and less aggressive or “demanding”, especially considering that “please help me” can be said in many ways verbally, each with a slightly different meaning.

My opinion, emoticons are great! I love them :) based on my experience, they help a lot in conveying the right idea, adding the right atmosphere in conversations, making your digital based conversations and email, that much richer. While they can’t completely replace all the rich elements of your real life speech, they definitely help.

REFERENCE LIST:

Walsh. M. 2006, “‘Textual shift’: Examining the reading process with print, visual and multimodal texts”, Australian Journal of Language and Literacy, Vol. 29, No. 1, p.24-37

Nelson, P (2009), 'More people fired because of online posts', KSL Newsworld, viewed 13th June 2010,

http://www.ksl.com/?nid=148&sid=7491222

E Books : New Media ecosystem

The Internet, in its most prevalent use is the widest and the most readily accessed platform of media available, it provides all sharing of all sorts of media, ranging from text, audio, videos, and even other interactive medias.

The media has long been one of the biggest business industries, and like every business, everyone has to adapt and utilize the internet to survive the competition. This has been the case for the music industry several years ago, and more recently the literature industries.

eBooks.com

E-books, are simply digital copies of books, not much can be compared between it and the hardcopy version, as they are, mostly the same, provides the same or sometimes more features by digital links.

Picture of Hardcopy

-hardcopies - too much trouble?

When compared to their hardcopy counterpart, -put survey (reference) finds that they prefer ebooks, and the only downside to this transition is a slight change of habit, such as taking “less bites more frequently”

So its all well for the transition, many claims that eBooks can adequately replace their older counterpart without much trouble, even with some little disagreements here and there. However, what of the business point of view? The biggest headache for this industry is just like the case for other media industry, its piracy.

Existing copies of

So might be the future of literature industries? Thankfully, they do have a solution:

Online Libraries :

-UniSA Online Library and Questia Online Library

Online libraries are the future business forms of the literature industry, they are basically trying to switch from single book sales to a service access to all the professional source of information you would need.

Students and researchers are amongst those who might find this service very useful; recent trend shows that the use of these online libraries are encouraged and supported by higher education curriculums among the world.

Take for example: THIS ASSIGNMENT!

Bibliography:

eBooks.com Digital Bookstore

http://www.ebooks.com/

UniSA Online Library

http://www.library.unisa.edu.au/

Questia Online Library

http://www.questia.com/Index.jsp

FAKE(?) CELEBRITY TWEETS!

-twitters! Up and coming new vocabulary for internet users around the world

Twitter is a microblogging service that allows each individual to post multiple entries relating to their daily activities, the rise of twitter in these recent years has been one of the most observed internet trend from analysts across all fields.

According to the Guardian columnist, Addley(2009),” twitter” is the hottest new word, mentioned in many articles British local and national newspapers . Despite the steady rise of popularity per month, it wasn’t until the actor Stephen Fry demonstrated how twitter can generate amazingly wide publicity that Twitter became the biggest buzz that it is today.

Following the media awareness of Twitter’s potential, countless celebrities joined the bandwagon and started to tweet their lives to the public, amongst them are many of those that some say are better kept private; for example Ashton Kutcher posting pictures of Demi Moore’s bum, Madonna and Jeniffer Aniston dumping their boyfriends.

-aren’t you at least slightly curious of what celebrities do every day?
click on picture to follow link

Surprisingly, controversial stories like this are by far, the most popular ones that propelled twitter to where it is today, there’s just so many amongst us that are so curious about what our favorite celebrities do daily. I don’t follow any celebrity in particular, but if given the chance I do want to know what their activities are like, it doesn’t hurt to be a bit curious right? ;)
Controversy surrounding celebrity tweets

So we all know Celebrity tweets are the bomb! Who wouldn’t be interested in the lives of these successful figures? But are they the real thing?

-another article by the Guardian, (2009), about 50-cent ghost tweets

click on picture to follow article

Most should be posted by someone other than them, with their consent, it’s not entirely fabricated of course, but it does have PR managers involved around it. They don’t always have the time to update their tweets every now and then. Maybe some are real, but mostly it’s someone else, for the most part, we don’t really mind. But how about something that’s ENTIRELY FAKE?

Highly controversial example of these “fake Tweets” (!? No no) include Dalai Lama’s account, just imagine the divine being tweeting his daily spiritual encounters. More recent ones include Shaq O’Neal and Steve Jobs impersonators.

-exposed fake accounts!
In my opinion, it’s just like every other thing online, the perks that comes with online anonymity has always been a double-edged blade. Some of us might not care at all, but most of us shouldn’t have too much trouble if we’ve been in the internet for this long. We aren’t that naïve to believe every other thing we read on the internet. Besides, I believe Twitter is doing their best to handle this issue, they don’t want anything to jeopardize their potential multibillion online gold mine.

REFERENCE LIST:

Addley, E (2009), 'The rise and rise of Twitter', The Guardian, viewed 13th June 2010,

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/blog/2009/mar/27/twitter-popularity

Luft, O (2009), 'Ghost Tweets: are celebrity twitters for real?', PC World, viewed 13th June 2010,

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/pda/2009/mar/27/twitter-celebrity-50-cent-ghost-tweets

IPad: wasted potential?

iPad, your latest style-slash-tech-savvy product buzz that came out somewhere around April 2010, certainly one of the “hottest” gadget to own just about now.

So after the longs months of wait and anticipation, comes the product, and in these past few months the online tech world has been buzzing all around giving reviews of the product; which you may find here, here, here, or maybe here. Just a few examples ;)

So what of the iPad? Does it live up its expectations? Is it a sensational hit? Well, based on what I read, unfortunately.. yessnotreally.

There are indeed differing opinions and reviews, positive and negative about the iPad, but mostly everyone agrees; it’s not gonna be that much of a hit, definitely a lot less than iPod or iPhone.

Let me summarize those long reviews for you:

Basically most of them agreed, it’s an overpriced decent device, good for both reading books and playing games, made elegant and stylish, but has serious flaws built into it, mainly when compared to iPhone; a lot of them thought, it’s a more expensive iPhone with less features, no USB support! And it doesn’t even make phone calls, its quite heavy too! …but we have to remember its only the first version.

On the other hand, a lot of people made jokes about it, especially on youtube:

5 Hilarious and Stupid Apple iPad Joke Videos

Well, I can’t really give you a personal take on this since I don’t have one, but judged on the features listed, and what I heard about it in the reviews, it does seem like a cool gadget, however…

It certainly could have been better!

Now, I have never been a big fan of Apple, not that I dislike it, but I’m not very gadget-savvy and I happen to prefer other products as of yet. But when I stumbled upon news of the up and coming release iPad a few months ago, I honestly thought that time, it’s something I have to buy ... let me explain why

It was because I thought the device would completely replace books and papers! (too much to expect?) and that I loved to draw and scribble on pieces of paper.

Imagine if this device can have handwriting support built around it, that it would be your “piece of paper” and textbook at the same time. You can scribble or draw any design to it and it would record flawlessly.

-no more heavy bags and messy papers! Just iPad!

Wouldn’t it be something all students and lecturers would love to have? But unfortunately, Apple opted for a virtual keyboard instead, it also has no USB support which made sharing that much more difficult, so that was all my false impression, but I think it’s a fair opinion on how apple could have done better.

What do you think? You’re welcome to leave some comment below J

REFERENCE LIST:

Paul, I (2010), 'iPad Reviews: The Good, the Bad, and the Ecstatic', PC World, viewed 13th June 2010,

<http://www.pcworld.com/article/193112/ipad_reviews_the_good_bad_and_ecstatic.html?tk=rel_news>

Mossberg, W (2010), 'Apple iPad Review: Laptop Killer? Pretty Close', All Things Digital, viewed 13th June 2010,

<http://ptech.allthingsd.com/20100331/apple-ipad-review/>

Baig, E (2010), 'Verdict on the iPad: it's a winner.', USA Today, viewed 13th June 2010,

<http://www.usatoday.com/tech/columnist/edwardbaig/2010-03-31-apple-ipad-review_N.htm>

Pogue, D (2010), 'Looking at iPad from two angles', New York Times, viewed 13th June 2010,

<http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/01/technology/personaltech/01pogue.html>

Good Document Design

There are many criteria on how a document should be designed to interest readers.

A poor document design would discourage proper and full reading of any particular document, which is contradictive to most publication’s purpose.

There are many rules and guidelines on making an attractive document design, take for example Reep(2006) design principles which discusses about Balance, Proportion, Sequence, and Consistency.

There is also an article about Nielsen’s 2005 worst weblog designs , which you can find here.

To illustrate the principles I will put up a few of my slides and analyze on how it was, correctly/incorrectly applied:

For the sake of this application, I will discuss on the point of Consistency by Diana Reep's theory.

(also because it's probably the only one I applied correctly :D)

Reep (2006) says Consistency refers to presenting similar features in similar styles.

On all 3 slides I used the same colors, format and margins. What does this do? Well I imagine the audience would be distracted and find it much more unpleasant if there was one with a different formatting, even with the same content, right after the first slide, something like:

Not that it looks worse, but because audience would waste time and concentrate less on what I'm trying to present instead of listening.

Other views on document design, particularly Nielsen's would say I applied his third principle (Non-Descript Posting Titles) incorrectly before, I put "Hello :D!" as my blog title previously, after reading the article, I think that's probably true, people looking to learn about Publications and Design would not find it very relevant, thus miss the search.

Well, I think I kinda passed the word limit by abit already, so I'll save the rest of the principles for another time, so do come back!

Reference List:

Nielsen, J 1997, Writing for the Web, viewed on 17 April 2010, http://www.useit.com/alertbox/9703b.html

Reep, DC 2006, 'Document Design', Technical Writing, ch. 6, 6th ed, pp. 133-172

New Forms of Media Publishing

Youtube

Facebook


One of the biggest use of internet these days, as I’m sure most of you would agree, would be Youtube and Facebook. According to Ibrahem(2010), a survey conducted by Retrevo.com Internet users, 48% of users log on to facebook and twitter after going to bed at night, and the poll also indicates that about 42% of their follow-up friction and facebook the first thing they do in the morning, there are even 8% that are doing it after waking up from sleep.

All these popular new forms of media makes a great idea for the Obama 2008 Election Campaign Group, as we all know the landslide victory is much attributed to creative campaigning, which includes Facebook, Twitter, and Youtube.

A good news article that illustrates this point would be Fraser (2008) USNEWS reporting on Obama’s online campaigning.

Examples of Obama campaign :

Youtube

Facebook

Twitter

Of course there are issues that rise through this new trend, one of them would be the annonymous comments anyone can make through the process of campaigning for example



annonymous hater abusing the media

But obviously, that's free speech, and the benefits of this new form of media is so obvious that some slight abuse can't compare, just look at Obama's approval rating (before the health care bill ;( though ).

Reference List:

Ibrahem, B (2010), A survey on users of Facebook and Twitter, Online, viewed 18th April 2010

http://www.allvoices.com/contributed-news/5456822-a-survey-on-users-of-facebook-and-twitter

Fraser, M (2008), Barack Obama and the Facebook Election, Online, viewed 18th April 2010 http://www.usnews.com/articles/opinion/2008/11/19/barack-obama-and-the-facebook-election.html