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

Types of Blogging Communities and How To Build Them

Online community is a form of open and public social interaction between online users, as with White(2006) definition of “a place for those who interacted online within some technological boundaries”. The most prevalent form of this were forums, but these days, by the growth of internet gave rise to many more forms of internet community, such as Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter.

Blogging community on the other hand, is a community built based around blogs, for example, if people were to post in this blog and interact with each other through it, sending comments, then maybe post in each other’s blogs, messages and discussions. Then we’d have a blogging community :) it’s quite simple really.

An example of a guide can be found in Rowse (2008) online publishing that explains quite clearly. Basically it tells you to designate your target audience, extend your outreach, join other communities first, and finally encourage people to participate.

On the other hand, White (2006) divided the blogging communities to:


· Boundaried Community



· Topic Centric


· Single Blogger Centric



Each picture is quite self explanatory, and those are various possibilities a blogging community can usually be built upon.


Reference List:


White, N (2006), 'Blogs and community-launching a new paradigm for online community?', Australian Flexible learning framework, viewed 16 April 2010
http://kt.flexiblelearning.net.au/tkt2006/edition-11-editorial/blogs-and-community-%E2%80%93-launching-a-new-paradigm-for-online-community


Rowse, D (2009) , '8 Tips for Building Your Community on Your Blog', viewed 15 April 2010, http://www.problogger.net/archives/2009/02/28/8-tips-for-building-community-on-your-blog/

Blog Classifications

A blog can bring in many forms of communication, not limited to images, sounds, videos, links, sometimes chat, and even interactive games inside it. Such flexibility makes a lot of different purpose and clasiffications of why blogs are created.

Some is created in form of self expression, some solely for reviews, some for publications or advertising, and a lot others for numerous reasons, therefore there are numerous ways blogs can be classified, let's bring Balkhis (2009) opinion for example.

According to him, most popular blogs are likely to be:

• Instructions and Tutorials e.g: Diet tips or how to lose weight by Jeremy Sawodny
• Informational e.g: The Quit-Smoking Blog by HeartCore group
• Case Studies e.g: Recycling Facts by PaceButtler Corporaton
• List Posts e.g: Technorati top 100 by Technorati
• Interviews e.g: Everything Warren Buffett by Share Investors Group
• Prediction Posts e.g: Global Warming Future Blog by annonymous
• Attack / Critique Posts e.g: Fly Air Asia? Not Me Blog by Adilah

Of course, this is just an example of a published blog classification, there are many others, take for example The Media Report by Funnel 2009, according to Margaret Simmons, blogs comes in many more elaborate classifications, such as:

• Pamphleteering Blog,
• Digest Blog
• Advocacy Blog
• Popular Mechanics Blog
• Exhibition Blog
• Gatewatcher Blog
• the Diary
• Advertisement
• News Blog

As you can see, many people had many different ideas on how many type of blogs are there. But generally they have the same idea that blogs should be classified by it's purpose, it's origins, what it includes and what it tries to convey, instead of any other reasons such as who created it.

References:

Simons, M 2008, A Taxonomy of Blogs, Online, viewed 15 April 2010, http://www.abc.net.au/rn/mediareport/stories/2008/2372882.htm#transcript

Balkhis 2009 , 7 Most Popular Type of Blog Posts, Online, viewed 14 April 2010 http://www.balkhis.com/for-starters/7-most-popular-type-of-blog-posts/

Blog Phenomenon, and its community benefits

Blogging is a huge segment of the web right now, according to this graph by Technorati survey, since 2006 there were approximately 100,000 blogs created everyday, this is according to Gartner(2006), a staggering amount, while some are indeed spam, but most of which he believes are active for some time. The graph below also demonstrate how fast the blogging phenomenon rose during it's booming years.

Why Blogs though? As I come to understand from being given tasks such as this, I feel that blogging is a very exciting tool of self expression. Maybe this is exactly what young people these days wants, thus the popularity of blogging.

A Technorati 2009 publication described below explains that 72% of the bloggers are indeed, simply hobbyists, they blog for fun, and I imagine it must be working well :)

As for the benefits of blogging besides for self-expression and fun, maybe the 15% of part timers that earn, according to the article up to $75,000 a year would explain it. Blogging these days can also be used as an income source, as means to advertise, an all around powerful publication tool.

As for me personally, I would read blogs probably for the same reason why I browse, information is invaluable in this day and age, personal likes of products and stuffs you don't wanna miss, provided to you by the many passionate and intelligent bloggers, all the good stuffs really!

References:

Gartner M, 2006, Blogging Set to Peak Next Year, Online, viewed 14 April 2010 http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/6178611.stm

Technorati States of the Blogosphere 2009, Online, viewed 13 April 2010 http://technorati.com/blogging/feature/state-of-the-blogosphere-2009/

Purpose of this Blog

Hello! I’m Andrew from Taylors University Malaysia. This blog was made for all you folks who are interested in stuff related to Publications and Design.

I'm very new as a blogger, by creating this blog I hope to learn from my research and maybe from those interested enough to post on the comment box as well, you're very welcome to post.

Hopefully I'll learn new things and have some fun along the way, and of course, same goes for you!

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