First and foremost, I’d like to make it very clear early on that this Web Presence does not create a wholly accurate reflection of myself as a person. It is merely a means to present one aspect of my personality, to the degree that I feel comfortable with. I’ve done my best to limit how much of me is in this, as I’m a fairly private person who doesn’t want too much of my personal life being made available for the online public’s entertainment. As Jill Walker Rettberg (2008) wrote: “Bloggers don’t simply write to their ‘Dear Diary’, they write into the world with a clear expectation of having readers.” This was very much on my mind when I went about constructing my Web Presence.
Considering that this was all done for an assignment, rather than as an act of personal desire to have the world see my work, I did very little by way of advertising my blog. It’s testament to the nature of interactivity and various components – content creation, tags, search functionality, and links – that are hallmarks of Web 2.0 (McAfee, 2006) that allowed users to find and view my blog despite literally no effort on my part to allow them to do so.
While I understand that the assignment requires me to put something out there, I’m not overly comfortable putting a whole lot out there, and it was clearly an influence on some of the decisions I made regarding style, content and layout. That said, obviously I’ve chosen to write reviews, which are inherently subjective, and it is through these reviews that I’m hoping character and personality traits can be expressed without giving away too much detail about who I am, what I do, or anything like that. It was a point raised in one of our tutorials later in the year, and a question I had asked myself very early in the semester: “How much of what we present online is an accurate representation of who we are in the real world, and is there a difference between the two identities?” I believe there is a difference, but as you will see, there are still plenty of ways in which I can get across information about myself without explicitly listing my name, address, phone number and date of birth on a website.
After much deliberation, I decided that WordPress would be my central node. This was primarily because it was the element that contained the majority of the original content. WordPress also has provisions for widgets allowing links and updates from other sites, and it was the use of those that allowed me to link my blog to the other nodes I used – Delicious, Youtube and Twitter, all of which you’ll find in the sidebar on the front page of my blog. The ability to link various sites through tags and widgets is incredibly awesome, and as mentioned above, a key component of Web 2.0. The biggest draw of WordPress, and the one that will see me continue to use it after this assignment, is the ability to create my own content with relative ease. I’ve dreamed of becoming a journalist for a long time, and while the relationship between blogging and journalism was discussed during the unit, and by me in an earlier assessment, I see blogging as a significant stepping stone towards a journalistic career. Blogging itself has been considered by some to be a form of independent, citizen journalism (Walker, 2004), and the advent of blogs and online news sites has changed the nature of online journalism itself (Rosen, 2006). While I’m not going to change the world with my little blog of movie reviews, It allows me to build a portfolio in relative anonymity, sharpening my writing skills on topics I already have a great affinity for before I have to branch out into the relative discomfort of the real world. When I decide to take it more seriously, that is not just treat the blog as an assignment, I’m looking forward to being able to interact with readings and followers through the comment sections and really forming a place for interesting discussions about films and filmmaking.
Keeping in mind my attitude towards getting too much information out there, but also striking a balance between that and generating some sense of personality, I decided to use a very minimalist layout and colour scheme, allowing my writing to be the star of the show, as it were. I’m not sure how well it works. I believe the quality of my writing is enough to keep people interested, and I’ve never been one for overly fancy layouts or anything like that, so it makes sense to me on a personal level.
Why did I choose to use a Twitter account to share updates rather than an RSS feed? It was a difficult choice. RSS feeds are great for letting followers of your blog know when new content has been added without them having to visit every day to check it out. However, that’s all it’s good for. Twitter, on the other hand, can be used to serve that function, while also being able to share other relevant content, and, something that I only experimented with the once, live blogging. The live blogging experiment didn’t work tremendously well, as I was still figuring Twitter out (and thus forgot the hashtags a lot of the time), but I see great potential for a communal viewing experience, using Twitter and sharing real-time reactions with others watching the same film in other locations. It’s something I plan to experiment with further down the line, free of deadlines. If I choose to keep this blog going, and decide that I would actually like an audience, an RSS feed is definitely something I’d consider to bring my writing to the audience without them having to actively search for it. I did, however, decide that RSS feeds would be useful in a different way. They allowed my to update the links to other sites on my sidebar, providing those sites’ RSS feeds, allowing me to provide my followers with up-to-date news from sources closer to the information than myself.
My use of Youtube was very clearly intended as little more than a supplement to the main blog. By sharing video content not necessarily created by me (due to an intense dislike of being in front of the camera, and having felt that I was already providing plenty of information through the other nodes) I was able to provide an interesting visual element that both helped to demonstrate what it was I would be discussing in the blog post, and also worked as a promotional element for the films themselves. I was careful to use nothing but official content posted by the studios for promotional purposes, the distribution of which is not considered a copyright infringement.
As with Youtube, I used Delicious primarily as a supplement to the main material being generated on the blog. It allowed me to link to supplemental material that, while touched on in some of the blog posts, serves as a much larger and deeper well of content relevant to the subject of my blog. In that way it was able to add depth and a context to my reviews, linking to other opinions and demonstrating that there is a broader scope to the entertainment industry than one guy reviewing DVDs. Ultimately though, it is hoped that the character and quality of my writing will be enough to bring readers back regularly, but we’ll have to wait and see. For the purposes of the assignment, I feel it served its purpose quite well. I had an idea at one point that perhaps I’d do some video reviews, speaking to camera and post them on my Youtube channel, but again, the desire to protect my identity, and a fear of performing in front of a camera, put paid to that. However, it was an option I considered, and something I’m well aware Youtube has the capacity for in terms of self-produced content.
McAfee, A.P. (2006). Enterprise 2.0: The Dawn of Emergent Collaboration. MIT Sloan Management Review (47.3), 20-28. Retrieved 29 September 2012 from www.wikiservice.at/upload/ChristopheDucamp/McAfeeEntrepriseDeux.pdf.
O’Reilly, T. (2005). What is Web 2.0? Design Patterns and Business Models for the Next Generation of Software. Retrieved 29 September 2012 from http://reilly.com/pub/a/web2/archive/what-is-web-20.html
Rettberg, J. (2008). Blogs, Communities and Networks, in Blogging. Cambridge: Polity Press. Retrieved 29 September 2012 from Curtin University of Technology Library E-Reserve.
Rosen, J. (2006). Web Users Open the Gates. (2006, June 19). The Washington Post. Retrieved 29 September 2012 from http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/06/18/AR2006061800618_pf.html.
Walker, L. (2004). On Local Sites, Everyone’s a Journalist. (2004, December 9). The Washington Post. Retrieved 29 September 2012 from http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A46519-2004Dec8.html.
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