is your blog a blog?

Now, ever since I attended yesterday's lesson on blogging, this question continues churning in my head-What exactly constitutes a blog? Does a url that ends with blogspot.com, livejournal.com, wordpress.com automatically imply that your blog is really a blog? Seriously speaking, I for once did believe in so. Until yesterday's class.

During our small group discussion, some points were raised by me and my colleagues (whom I prefer to refer as 'classmates') to support our stance for what consitutes a true blog. Here are the points:

- there should be frequent entries or blog posts
How frequent is frequent then, you would ask. my personal guide is: at least once weekly or fornightly, you wouldnt want to disappoint your followers by letting them wait for your updates isnt it? But, if you submit blog entries every few hours, I would say, I would feel so overwhelmed. So, use your own intuition will u? Quality matters apart from quantity.

- own writing style, content and personality
it wouldnt be called a blog if you purely copy other people's content or discussion. So yeah, have some originality or personality in your blog so that it adds value for those who read your blog.

-engagement and interactivity
blog should allow readers to comment and interact with you and others. connectivity is the key here.

- RSS feeds
it is not exactly a must but RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is becoming more common recently. it allows readers who subscribed to your blog posts to receive updates of your new entries.

Having raised up the factors mentioned above, at the end of the day, i would say that there is no real boundary to what is a true blog, only pure guidelines. Now, is my blog a blog? I would say yeah, because I said so. =p

The rising star in cyber world

Everyone's talking about digital and new media recently. Well, I guess it all attributes to the convenience of broadband, mobile network and wireless technology whatsoever.

Hence, it was just the right time to take up Digital Media Across Asia module. One obvious reason being that i can clear my Global and Regional Studies Elective. It is a big deal to me becos... i cant graduate without clearing this elective. The second reason was already mentioned- it is the in-thing now you know...

Plus, there is one more reason tat further spurs up my interests for this module. Because my prof for this subject- Prof Michael Netzley, is interesting and humourous. His lessons are engaging and fun in a way that it actually motivated me to read up 3 chapters of his readings before class. Now, I seriously seldom do that, except during exam period. Perhaps it is also because the required reference book, "Groundswell" by Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff, was informative yet reader friendly.

After 2 weeks of his class, I found that I had seriously under-rated the usefulness of digital media all these while. I had also thought that I was adept at using internet tools as well, until I attended the class. New digital tools such as RSS, technorati, google reader, del.icio.us, Plurk etc came into the picture and I was like, huh? What are they? I only know how to tickle frens or tag names in facebook. It was pretty overwhelming at first when prof demo to us step by step but I think, once you get started, it's hard to stop using them?

and I just discovered that Blogger is providing a new "Following" Feature. You get to feature your followers (your blog readers) on your blog and it is also linked with google reader. Woah... great addition. but dont get too excited yet, it is still in experimenting stage nw and will only be rolled out after few wks. But I got a feeling that it shd be ready before tat. Stay tuned.