Mission 2: Culture Research

As with most projects, I began with steady research on the topic - starting from the origin's of blogging. However, before I delved any further, I stopped and decided to make a list of exactly what information I wanted to put into the slides. The following was a small guide that would point me in the right direction:

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• Definition - What is blogging?
• Variations - What types of blogging exist nowadays?
• Origin - How did blogging begin? 
• Notable Events - How did blogging rise to popularity? How were blogs used? Who was involved?
• Early Blogging Platforms
• RSS & Blogging
• How RSS works
• Roman's blogging experience - Weebly and Wix vs Blogger
• Analytics and its contribution to blogging
• Blogs of the Future
• Vince's blogging experience - Tumblr pros & cons
• Tumblr's Unique Features
• Graph - Blogging's Popularity
• Graph - Comparing Popularity between the platforms we used
• My Blogging Experience – Wordpress Pros & Cons
• Wordpress’s Unique Features

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Although the guide was useful, the process of attempting to condense that information in way that is both concise and not monotonous/boring to the audience was difficult. There were various times when I thought that nobody wanted to hear this as I read over the presentation. I figured bullet points was a more effective approach in delivering information. This would (hopefully) be easy for me to take occasional peeks to stay on point. In addition, the audience wouldn’t have to stare at a board with a mountain of words they probably wouldn’t even read. Messing around with themes and color as well as squeezing in images where possible made a great difference. We also included a bibliography slide at the end with links we used throughout our research. During the process of creating our presentation 

Creating my blog

Using wordpress.com, I went through - a registration process when creating my website. Wordpress could be used to create other types of sites such as an online store, so I had to ensure to select the 'Blog' category. The next step was selecting the category of the blog in order for worpress to provide me (the author) with relevant content. Coming up with a name for the blog was probably the most difficult step. I knew if I didn't have a good name I wouldn't be too proud of the work I'd post in it. So after researching some words for inspiration, I finally stuck with Espial Art. The name seemed fitting to me since it was essentially about the process of discovery through illustrations.  The first thing I immediately noticed when setting up my blog is that: compared to blogger, the themes and customizations are somewhat limited. There were not many that really stood out to me. I decided to stick with a minimalist type of look. 

What I liked about wordpress is that it provides you some tips as you begin your blogging experience - which I have not yet seen anywhere else in my early blogging experience.  This can be in the form of notification giving advice e.g tags such as zerotohero are useful for new authors to get noticed and support each other. 

You can also recieve emails with tips and reminders. Although it your mailbox tends to get cluttered pretty quick. However because I used a Google account specifically for this the purpose of this blog, it didn't bother me too much. 

Posting

I tried to be consistent but I ended up doing two posts overall. Similar to what I did with this blog, I started with an introduction post -- talking a little bit about myself. The next post was about a discovery phase of a project I was working on. It was after the second post that my blog began to get noticed. Strangely enough, the wordpress statistics were quite inaccurate as it did not show me the correct amount of page views and likes I have recieved as it shows on the actual posts. 

Inaccurate Statistics

Actual amount of likes

In the end, our group did not have enough to go on when it came to comparing each other's blogs. Instead we decided to mainly focus on how effective the platform itself is based on our experience of using it. 

Click here to view presentation.