FdA Programme Code AFFDCDC09
Programme Title Creative Digital Communication
Level Certificate
Module title: Visual / Auditory Literacy,2
Project Title Social Media Project Code VALE Pro 1
Term Taught Au Sp Su Contact
Learning Outcomes
On successful completion of this module students will be able to:
LO1 Research and analyze examples of digital culture
LO2 Demonstrate the appropriate use of technology for research
LO3 Communicate, in written form, an analysis of an example of digital culture
Blogs
Blogs are quite a popular public Internet information facility that is available to all who are happy to listen to the views of any body willing to give it. Any individual in the street to any large conglomerate who feels that they wish to put their side of any argument into the public arena.
To make sense a brief explanation of what a blog is and how it came about, would make things much clearer. So in brief, a history of the Internet may be of help. With the start of many things, early bloggers did not have a name for what they were doing. While it took some time for the genre and the name to develop, blogging has been around since the beginning of the Internet.
Dawn of Internet Time: Tim Berners-Lee at CERN begins keeping a list of all new sites as they come online.
June 1993: NCSA’s oldest archived what’s new list of sites. (No longer exists)
June 1993: Netscape begins running it’s what’s New! List of sites. (Now AOL)
Jan 1994: Justin Hall launches Justin’s Home Page, which would become Links from the Underground.
April 1997: Dave Winer launches Scripting News. His company, Userland, will release Frontier, Manila and Radio Userland, all website and blog content software.
Sept 1997 Slashdot launches their news for nerds.
Dec 1997: Jorn Barger coins the term web log.
November 1998: Cameron Barrett publishes the first list of blog sites on Camworld.
Early 1999: Peter Merholz coins the term blog after announcing he was going to pronounce web blogs as “wee-blog”. This was then shortened to blog.
Early 1999: Brigitte Eaton starts the first portal devoted to blogs with about 50 listings.
July 1999: Metafilter’s earliest archives.
July 1999: Pitas launches the first free build your own blog web tool.
August 1999: Pyra releases Blogger that become the most popular web based blogging tool to date, and popularises blogging with many Internet users.
It seems like Blogs are everywhere these days. You can’t seem to surf the Internet without seeing the word Blog somewhere. The intent of this article is to explain the basics what a Blog is and how you can use them to help promote your business and gain valuable information quicker that surfing the Internet.
The word Blog is short for web log. Basically a Blog is just an area set aside you to write articles that can easily be accessed with a special program called a RSS reader. In case you’re wondering RSS stands for real simple syndication.
When you set up a Blog you select a template that will house your information. Once you have the Blog set up you can post whatever information you like. It’s really a fast way to get your articles and information up on the web and the templates look great! You don’t have to mess with all the technical end of getting something up on a web page (HMTL layout, FTP, etc). One thing about Blogs is that you can get the software to read them for free. Also, you can set up an account and create your own Blog for free!
One thing I should note is, you can read Blogs with your standard browser and post comments on the content of the Blog. An optional way to read Blogs is by using a RSS reader program. You simply subscribe to whichever Blogs that you want to and they are available immediately in the reader. Many people like to use a reader because you have all of the Blogs that you are interested in, in one place and you don’t have surf all over the Internet to read them. Here is a Blog reader explained in the form of a youtube made by Google. (Youtube to be explained later)
Some Examples of blogs that are available from News organisation are shown.
You can get your own free Blog quite easily, some are shown below.
www.expressionengine.com <http://www.expressionengine.com>
www.wordpress.com <http://www.wordpress.com>
www.tumblr.com <http://www.tumblr.com>
They are quite easy to set up and post. There are many advantages that Blogs offer over a web site.
1. You don’t have to mess with an HTML layout. You just post your info and the info looks wonderful because the Blog uses the template that you set up.
2. You can post as often as you like. I wouldn’t send an email to a person every day but with a Blog you can post as much as you like as often as you like.
3. Email spam filters do not block Blogs because they are not an email communication.
4. You can make as many Blogs as you like on any subject.
