Exegesis

 

My web presence is a blog that reviews veggie burgers and I wanted it to be collaboration. The way that I made my blog participatory was by making sure it contained all the characteristics of Web2.0; a rich user experience, user participation, contained metadata and had dynamic content. I could not achieve this goal without using my three contributing nodes; Twitter, Del.icio.us and Flickr.

I chose a blog as my central node because I wanted my web presence to be about collaboration. In topic 2.1, the reading by Rettberg (2008) talked about ‘distributed conversation’ and I thought this quality would be appropriate for my theme. My theme was reviewing veggie burgers and I wanted a central node where I could write decent length posts, upload photos and be able to connect and talk to other people. Blogs are a great place to write down your own thoughts and opinions but as McAfee (2006) discusses, it is the content on blogs that is cumulative, meaning that after a post is created, people continue to comment, update and link to that post. I chose the blog publishing software of WordPress to create my blog but I didn’t install any sort of server software, I just chose the free hosting offered by WordPress because it was easy and I didn’t want the ability to write code. I wanted my blog to be easy to read, not cluttered and have the option of customisation to an extent, so when choosing a layout, I searched for themes that had two columns and a custom header/background. There were a few themes that came up but I ultimately went with ‘Bueno’, a simple theme that had everything I was looking for, colour options and a playful feel to it. I didn’t want my blog to look professional or classy because that wouldn’t suit my theme. I made the colours and fonts bold and playful because I wanted my blog to resonate that I am an amateur food critic who reviews for fun.

Just like the characteristics of Web 2.0 described by O’Reilly (2005), I wanted my blog to create a rich user experience, encourage user participation, contain metadata and have dynamic content. For my blog to have all these characteristics, I had to choose three tools to be my contributing nodes that would help make my web presence participatory. I had already chosen the participatory technology of the blog as my central node so I wanted to use other participatory technologies from the areas of social networking and content sharing to be my contributing nodes. In the end, I chose Twitter, a social networking tool, Del.icio.us, a tool that aids collaboration through metadata and links and Flickr, a content sharing tool.

I chose Twitter as one of my contributing nodes because it is participatory and could also be used as a micro-blog for when I didn’t have time to write full blog posts. Twitter is also useful to gather a following, by using hash tags such as #foodreview or #vegetarianfood I can help people with similar interests find my blog. The social networking tool Twitter is great for sharing information with friends. It can be used to update new blog posts, what veggie burger I’ll be reviewing next and even live photos of the food. Having live Twitter updates on my blog makes the content more dynamic and hopefully encourages user participation.

I selected Del.icio.us as one of my tools because I thought it reflected my theme well. My blog is about reviewing veggie burgers so I wanted a way to store all the websites I visited that reflected this theme. Using Del.icio.us helped me bookmark websites that I thought added something to my blog and also helped me realise how useful it is to tag my own blog posts. To create a rich user experience on my blog, I made sure to bookmark sites that were directly related to veggie burgers, such as a website of recipes and then tagged them correctly so that people interested in the topic could follow the trail back to my blog. I learnt from Rettberg (2008) that there are search engines specifically for blogs and they search for blogs using keywords. These “keywords which reflect the subject content of web pages and make that content easier for searchers to find” are called metadata (Browne, 2006, p.30). My blog would only turn up on those search engine sites if the keywords matched the tags that I enter into my posts.

My third contributing node, Flickr is a content sharing site that also uses tagging. Folksonomy is the name given to the categorisation system that emerges from tagging (Peterson, 2006). When I upload photos to Flickr, it asks to enter tags that reflect the themes in that photo, such as ‘vegetarian’. Then when people are searching for photos to do with vegetarian food my photo will come up and they can follow the link to my blog. I thought using Flickr as a tool was a good idea because not only does it give me a place to store my photos but it also gives people the opportunity to explore the theme of my blog more thoroughly.

I wanted my web presence to be a blog that reviewed veggie burgers and for it to be everything that Web 2.0 represents; a rich user experience, participatory, contain metadata and have dynamic content. I kept this in mind when making all the choices in creating my web presence and used three contributing nodes that I think made this happen.

References

Browne, G. (2010). Indexing of Free, Web-based Electronic Resources. Legal Information Management, 10(1), 28-33. doi: 10.1017/S1472669610000277.

McAfee, A. (2006). Enterprise2.0: The Dawn of Emergent Collaboration. MIT Sloan Management Review, 47(3), 21-28. Retrieved from:  http://sloanreview.mit.edu/the-magazine/2006-spring/47306/enterprise-the-dawn-of-emergent-collaboration/

O’Reilly, T. (2005). What Is Web 2.0: Design Patterns and Business Models for the Next Generation of Software. Retrieved from: http://oreillynet.com/1pt/a/6228.

Peterson, E. (2006). Beneath the metadata: some philosophical problems with folksonomy. D-Lib MagazineI, 12(11). Retrieved from: http://www.dlib.org/dlib/november06/peterson/11peterson.html.

Rettberg, J., (2008), Blogs, Communities and Networks in Blogging. Polity Press; Cambridge.