The Splogging Hamlet

There are all kinds of blog communities nowadays; vlogs (video blogs) , moblogs (mobile phone blogs), linklogs (links to sites) and etc. but, is splogging the new trend in blogging? Splogging which is known as spam blogging, lures people to the blog in order to ‘cash money into their register’. They make fake blogs in the advertising world to get their money thus slowing down people’s search process on the internet. According to blog.spinn3r.com, there are 720,000 blog pings every hour and 93% of them are spam. Below is the statistics within 24 hours. According to the article also, the dips in the graphs are due to monitoring issues but not the representative of the underlying data. (blog.spinn3r.com).

 

Image is by blog.spinn3r.com, last updated in January 21, 2008

How do we know if it is a Splog?

 

Spam blogging can be easily identified. There are a few things where we can spot to know if it is a splog.

 First of all, nothing adds up or matches. The other points would be that:

-the content does not match the title or the links

-the signature name does not match the post author

-sentences do not add up

-paragraphs change subjects and topics in the middle

-blog lists number of posts in archive but does not add up

(Lorelle VanFossen, 2006)

 

Therefore, to avoid reading splogs, David Sifry, founder of Technorati, said that we should know how to identify it by even without reading it by identifying the characteristics because they have different characteristics which computers can identify and eliminate them from search engines (Mann.C , 2006). Although we are not able to stop splogs from occurring, at least by this way, we can avoid from running into them, thus, being a victim whilst wasting our time and slowing down our search process.

 

References

 

Anon, Blog Ping and Spam Statistics. Viewed 28^th April 2006 from http://blog.spinn3r.com/2008/01/blog-ping-and-s.html

 

VanFossen, L (2006), How to Spot a Blog. Viewed 29^th April 2008 from

http://lorelle.wordpress.com/2006/09/23/how-to-spot-a-splog/

 

Mann, C.C (2006), Spam+Blogs=Trouble, Wired 14.09. Viewed 29^th April 2008 from

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.09/splogs.html?pg=3

 

 

Blogging-a ‘Phenomenon’?

Reflecting on the question, is it really a phenomenon? In this 21^st century, I guess it is. Everyone in this new era has blogs for different reasons. According to Technorati’s, “State of Blogosphere”, there are about 57 million blogs counted and are still growing at the rate of 3 million blogs a month and a hundred thousand a day. According to Brian Heumann, in Technorati’s “State of Blogosphere”, it stated that the size of the blogosphere in German was approximately 500,000 which also equals to one percent out of the 50million blogs counted in the year 2006 where most of them are weblogs.

 

“The globalization of the blogosphere continues. Our data appears to show both English and Spanish languages are a more universal blog language than the other two most dominant languages, Japanese and Chinese, which seem to be more regionally localized.”

(Technorati, 2006).

 

Meanwhile in Malaysia, according to a research done by a blogger, Jun-E, only 22 are unemployed and out of these, 13 are females. In connection, in Dan Farber’s article, he said that Steve Outing from the Poynter Institute said through blogging, it helps the media websites bring more personal and less institutional voices. Therefore, blogging in this country would bring a lot of benefits to the organizations as they can get more individuals to get involved. From the bloggers side meanwhile, they can feel more involved in the organization and, to answer the question, I think it would be a yes, blogging is a phenomenon.

 

 

 

References

Farber, D (2004), What’s Up With Blogging and Why Should You Care. Viewed 28^th April 2008 from

http://techupdate.zdnet.com/techupdate/stories/main/What_is_up_with_blogging.html

 

Heumann, B (2007), Marketing Opportunities in the German Blogosphere. Viewed 28^th April 2008 from

http://www.globalbydesign.com/blog/2007/12/05/marketing-opportunities-in-the-german-blogosphere/

 

Sifry, D. (2006), State of Blogosphere 2006. Viewed 28^th April 2008 from

http://technorati.com/weblog/2006/11/161.html

 

 

Online vs Print Designs

Writing for print and writing for online websites or blogs or others are very different. Although there are some similarities, which are to be concise, short, simple, easy to understand and credible, there are some differences which can be seen between the two mediums of writing. According to Jakob Nielsen, 79% of their test readers do not read word for word in a web page and only 16% do. Therefore, web pages should have highlighted keywords, meaningful subheadings, an idea a paragraph, the inverted pyramid style of writing, half the word count than a conventional writing and most importantly, credibility. (Nielsen, 1997).

 

Another point we should take into consideration is that when it comes to writing for web pages, we are catering to a large number of audience. In another article by Sarah Horton on writing for web, if the content of writing on a webpage is more for reference, we should break our information and write for scanning (Horton, 2001) as Jakob Nielsen said that users tend to scan the page rather than read it word for word.

 

 Image from www.dartmouth.edu /~webtech/articles

 

 

Meanwhile, for print writing, we can ‘control’ the reader with our content (Redshaw, 2003). Reading text is much different than scanning a text as reading involves comprehension, decoding, responding and analysing at different cognitive levels (Walsh, 2006) while scanning a text, people tend to scan in the ‘F’ shape. (Nielsen, 2006)

 

Image from http://www.useit.com/alertbox/reading_pattern.html

 

 

 

 References

Nielsen, J (1997), How Users Read on the Web. Viewed on 29^th April 2008 from http://www.useit.com/alertbox/9710a.html

 

Nielsen, J (2006), F-Shaped Pattern for Reading Web Content. Viewed 29^th April 2008 from http://www.useit.com/alertbox/reading_pattern.html

 

Horton, S (2001), Writing for Web. Viewed 29^th April 2008 from http://www.dartmouth.edu/~webteach/articles/text.html

 

Redshaw, K (2003), Web Writing vs. Print Writing. Viewed 29^th April 2008 from http://www.kerryr.net/webwriting/guide_web-vs-print.htm

 

Walsh, M. (2006), The ‘Textual Shift”, Examining the Reading Process with Print, Visual and Multimodal Texts, Australian Journal of Languange and Literacy, Vol. 29, No.1, pp 24-37

 

The Blogging World

As in ‘Blogging- a Phenomenon?’, we can see that the blogging world or better known as blogosphere is growing vastly without anyone noticing it. The only people that would know would be the bloggers themselves. This would be there are various types of blogs that are used for people to express themselves.

 

Deviation of Blogs that exist

 

–vlog (video blogs)

-linklogs (links of sites in a blog)

-sketchlog (sketches or drawing blogs)

-tumblelogs (a mix of media that make up a blog)

-moblog (mobile blogs)

 

As there are many types of blogs exist, people take advantage of its existence in order to get more benefits for their organization. Most of the blogs would be personal blogs to express how they feel but in this new blogging world, the business and corporate world too take advantage of the existence of blogs in order to get more profits. Personally, I think that blogging has a use for everyone as it serves a purpose of satisfying and gratifying people in some ways. Coming from this, people tend to also form their own blogging community.

 

To do this, when we start a new blog, we should find new readers and a community to belong to. Thus, we should at least make an effort for our blogs to be read online. As for an example, PabloPabla, joined a blogging forum and also surfed other blogs. To what I think, from here, he can expand his readers from here as people would come to know him. Now, he has mushroomed to five blogs altogether.

 

Blogging Community

 

A blogging community serves a place for bloggers to expand the social circle online. The community they belong in is the reason that they are encouraged to update their blogs all the time. Although some blogs are personal reasons as like to update family members on what is happening, bloggers that join a community usually share a likeness. As for example, TheGoodBlogs is a blogging community which bloggers can join to connect with other bloggers where they can interact on anything and everything like about health, latest gadgets, even food and many others. As such, a blogging community is quite useful.

Purpose of ‘Tittle-Tattle’

Most people use blogs as a personal place to write and express how they feel. However, there are also other blogs that serve as a place to inform, sell ideas and products concerning their organization. The purpose Tittle-Tattle exists is to inform the users of blogs about blogging and issues within the blogosphere. Thus, including information about also, the issues in designing theories, this blog is a good place for anyone involved in the media industry especially students to gain a little bit more information. Tittle-tattle being to gossip or chat, I will scribble down the little information that I know on blogging and publishing design issues. Any comments are most welcomed in any of the posts.