The term “Web 2.0” is used to describe new age websites which focus highly on user generated content, such as blogging. With an influx of users creating and sharing content on the web, there needed to be a way to categorise it all, and make it easier for web 2.0 users to find and access what they are interested in, hence the creation of tagging. A common example of tagging would be on sites such as tumblr and instagram, where using tags to categorise image, text, video, and audio post is popular. If your account is not protected by password or manual access, any post with a particular tag will appear under that tag in the search network of the respective app/website.

For example, if I wanted to share an image of a dog on my instagram and wanted it to reach a larger group than my current following, I could use tags such as, #dog, #animal, #cute, etc.

This post is to show my understanding of tagging my own blog posts, hence tagging this post and future NM posts under “#Blog-Checklist”.

Link to my tag: http://www.mediafactory.org.au/brooke-evernden/tag/blog-checklist/

I found this song when searching the list of creative commons music on soundcloud!

This is what I drew a typical blog to look like. Also to show that I can insert a photo onto my blog.

Last week in Networked Media we began discussing Copyright and IP. Copyright is Australia works under the general basis that any piece of original work is protected under Australian copyright laws, no matter what the work is. The author of the work is also liable to copyright protection for their entire life, plus another 70 years following. The idea of copyright is based around the fact that it protects the author from other individuals from stealing their work, using it without permission and claiming it as their own. Copyright is not subject to just being owned by the author, but can also in some circumstances be owned by a company, employer or group. For work such as a film, cinematic copyright must be claimed for the visual aspects of the film, as well as sound copyright for the audio aspect of the film.

Another aspect of copyright, is creative commons. This is what authors use when they want to allow for the wide distribution of their work, without the added hassle of granting permission to everyone who wants permission to the work. Creative commons licences are made up of elements (rules) that the author can put in place if they wish, however different work may have more or less elements than another. Some of these elements include having to credit the original creator when using the work, as well as not using the work in forms that will be distributed in exchange for money.

I don’t personally follow any blogs online from domains such as blogspot, however I follow a lot of “online influencers” on instagram, as I’m sure most people do. One person in particular that I have followed for a year or so now is a girl named Eileen Kelly, who is more commonly known by her online name, “killerandasweetthang”  only fairly recently was it that I found that she had a more typical online blog, under the same handle. The blog as I discovered was based around the themes of general health, sex and love. Despite none of these topics really being things I look into deeply in my free time, I found myself drawn into discovering more about her blog, due to my prior interest in her as a person already.

The aesthetics of the blog interested me and I found intriguing, the colours, layout and how Eileen presented herself in this forum. Much like the persona she had created on instagram, she carried that over to this blog, making myself and other past followers likely to be drawn to it, and even more interested in the topics she does as a result of this. It is obvious that she has used her already established instagram following to create the instant success of this blog, which is not a negative thing, instead, a practical way to gain a following. This got me thinking how important a personal image and persona of yourself can be online. Me, being a consumer of media, and in particular her content, I have been more drawn to it by her, rather than the content itself. It also made me curious how many other individual bloggers/online influencers I have had the same unintentional reaction to.

Whilst writing this, I can’t think of any off the top of my head, but I can guarantee if I looked into my different following lists across instagram, twitter and facebook, there would be names that undoubtably appear more than once. Of course the content that you blog about is the main leading factor in the reception of a blog, but I’m now thinking that individual persona is almost just as important.

Todays flipped class has given me the chance to look deeper into what blogging really is and where it has come from . It’s difficult to sum up years of online evolution into one post, but the easiest way to start is simply, what is blogging? In short, blogging is the publication of work into a personal online forum. The logistics of blogging include how the individual post is formatted and labeled, this including generally a title, date and the time the piece is published. The nitty gritty parts of blogging include optional comment sections and ways for readers to interact with the bloggers posts. Blogging is becoming a new age format of social networking, allowing many “voices” to be heard. Before the general term blogging came around, the use of web blogs have been used since the birth of the internet itself in 1990. Unlike blogs today, these web blogs were unable to host any forms of media, such as photo, film and audio and was strictly limited to text. Today what makes blogging great is that they are consistently changing, evolving and being adjusted by their creators. This again is unlike weblogs that were consistent, so once they were made live, there were rarely changes made to them. Blogging today is constantly evolving and changing, and will continue to do so hopefully in years to come.