There are many trends for blog as in blogs appear as an electronic diary at first but due to emergence of subcategories of blogs, there are many types of blogs. For instance, vlog (video blogging) is a blog with videos (ex YouTube) and others developed such as photolog, linklogs, artlogs, tumblelogs and others. Many genres are available in blogosphere like political blogs, travel blogs, fashion blogs and etcetera. It depends to the blogger’s purposes and intended audience of the blog. There are many blogging trends around world, where different places have different trends and therefore, Europe, Asia and Malaysia have each different trend too.
Jacklang blog is one of the famous blog in France that posted political issues and by using his blog to convey message to the public (http://www.blogjacklang.net/). As seen, we can conclude that French government uses the current blogging trend and convert blogs into political blog to reach out to the public.
Besides, Hong Kong too uses blog as a medium to convey business tips and information through stock blogs. The blogs reveal on Hong Kong current stock market and business issues which is indeed a good news and convenient way on checking the latest information for the online stock watchers. (http://hongkongstockblog.blogspot.com/ ).
Lim Kit Siang, a famous Malaysian politician posts political issues in his blog and comment about the Malaysia political issues. Latest updates and news of our new government can now be known immediately by a single click at Lim’s blog. Readers can also post questions and comments in the blog to get answers on the latest political issues. (http://blog.limkitsiang.com/)The types of blog that prevalent in Europe, Asia, and Malaysia are political blogs and social blogs. Political blogs authors express their own opinions and views in their country in order to gain supporters and let their readers know what are their views in some political issues. On the other hand, social blogs give readers about the author’s own lifestyles and experiences to attract more readers to visit their blogs. Besides, due to the number of hit on particular blogs, advertiser will place advertisement for those blogs which have many readers.
The benefit for the political blog is that they can post they own opinions and views as long as it is not against the law in the particular country. There are some companies such as Nuffnang and Advertlets give every blogger a chance to earn money through blogging. As long as your hit per day can reach their certain amount, these companies allow you to apply for their advertisements. There is an awesome blog in Singapore where the blogger is making living through her blog. Xiaxue is a well known Singaporean blogger who more than 20,000 hit in a day, thus advertising companies pays her to place their advertisements in her blog to reach out to her readers.
In local blogosphere, Jeff Ooi is a famous blogger who blogs in political issues. By using the blog, Jeff Ooi expresses his personal opinions and views in Malaysia political issues. Nowadays there is a rising form of blogging which is known as Vlog (video blog). Vlog and Blog are quite similar, just that Vlog is blogging in the form of video. Normally vloggers will post their videos up to YouTube, instead of posts in words, vlogger prefer to upload their videos which are inclusive of visual and audio system to attract their audiences. Vlogger usually post their videos based on their intended readers demand (Kushner 2006)
Nowadays blog is not only a trend among internet users but also being used for other purposes such as promotional purposes. Corporate companies are now using blog for the purpose to reach out to their market due to majority of the community are internet users. Corporate blogs are unlike from normal blogs as they are posted by the organization in order to achieve the organizational objectives. For example Samsung, where they convey messages, solutions to their products problems as well as their company’s latest information to the public. Blogs will help keep their users updated on their latest updates and even attract new customers if their blogs are well-designed, updated constantly, and interesting (The Economist 2006)
There are bloggers who blog on certain issues that attracts many enthusiasts, for example fashion, politic, entertainment, food, entertainment and etcetera. Therefore, communities are set up in order to let bloggers connect each other to share common interest as well as ideal. A local famous blogger, Kenny Sia, posted about his own travel adventures and his current daily life with some dry joke that manage to gain a great amount of visitors to his blog. Due to the rapid growing of internet, it is easy to create a blog as there are many free blog hosting websites such as Blogger, Wordpress, and Xanga. Most of the blogs hosting sites have blog communities in which communities called Blogrings. It is allows bloggers to join in clubs and societies that share the same interests with them.
According to Walsh (2006), the website should be designed based on the audience desired, contexts and contents should made as precedence as fine document design for purpose to connect and encourage readers to be involved with the organization itself. In now technology era, online media has taken over the traditional print media. Internet website is flexible and multimodal whereas the print media is only controlled by texts and images and it is more to be monomodal based, because an internet website are contains with texts, animation, music, hyperlinks, video clips and also images (Walsh 2006). The blog’s author are able to use own creativity on designing their own blogs, no matter how the design is, every blog has the same characteristic which is framing in order to divide the columns for the post, the author profile, links and other features (Kress and van Leeuwen). Framing is vital in order to keep the website organized, eye-soothing and comprehensible.
Books are a good example of print media. It is not flexible enough and interactivity because it is monomodal based where it is contain texts and images. In order to understand all the message that conveying, reading every text accordingly is needed.
Online media such as websites offers flexibility compared to print media. Websites uses hyperlinks to engage readers with what they have to offer. According to Schriver (1997), hyperlinks are good and convenient for readers because hyperlinks allow readers to choose their own way to serves their own interest and needs.
Blogs are a good example of the new forms of media publishing. Mobile phone is one of the trends for nowadays, because mobile phone makes life easier and brought people to the convenient lifestyle. Mobile blogging is one of the new forms of online media where the user publishes blog entries contents directly to the web server by using a mobile phone. Even though, the new forms of media publishing are expanding but yet, it does not mean the death of the traditional forms.
References:
kennysia.com 2008, kennysia.com, viewed on 25 April 2008, <http://www.kennysia.com/>.
Advertlets 2007, About Adverlets, viewed 25th April 2008, <http://www.advertlets.com/about>.
Xiaxue 2008, Xiaxue.blogspot.com - Everyone's reading it, viewed 25 April 2008, <http://www.xiaxue.blogspot.com/>.
Kress, G & van Leeuwen, T 2006, Reading images: The grammar of visual design, 2nd edn, Routledge, London.
Microsoft® Encarta® Online Dictionary 2007, Msn Encarta, viewed on 25 April 2008. http://encarta.msn.com/dictionary_/weblog.html
Kushner, D 2006, Prime time for vlogs?, viewed 25th April 2008, <http://money.cnn.com/magazines/business2/business2_archive/2006/05/01/8375939/.com/magazines/business2/business2_archive/2006/05/01/8375939/>.
Screenshots, 2008, Jeff 4 Malaysia, viewed on 25 April 2008,<http://www.jeffooi.com/>
ClickZ, The Blogosphere By The Number, viewed on 25 April 2008 http://www.clickz.com/showPage.html?page=3438891
Schriver, KA 1997, Dynamic in document design: creating texts for readers, Wiley Computer Pub., New York.
Walsh, M 2006, ‘textual shift’: examining the reading process with print, visual and multimodal texts, Australian journal of language and literacy, vol.29, no.1, pp.24-37.
limkitsiang for Malaysia 2008, limkitsiang.com, viewed on 26 April 2008, <http://www.limkitsiang.com/ >
blogjacklang 2008, blogjacklang.net, viewed on 26 April 2008, <http://www.blogjacklang.net/ >
hongkongstockblog 2008, hongkongstockblog.blogspot.com, viewed on 26 April 2008, <http://hongkongstockblog.blogspot.com/ >
