This blog has been created initially
as part of a university course of study that requires the creation of a web
presence through a particular primary medium or platform. A blog was chosen for
this presence because it offers the opportunity to create an ongoing presence
that will reflect my own interests and allow an informal way of presenting
those interests. Not Just for Vegos is reflective of a particular lifestyle
choice, vegetarianism, and – I hope – will connect me with a similarly minded
community. While there are many vegan and vegetarian sites and blogs, I hope to
be more inclusive with this presence by not limiting my posts and links to
purely vegetarian topics or being too strongly ideologically driven as many vegetarian
and vegan blogs are. The choice of avatar – the guinea pig – was easy as they
are vegetarian, non threatening and above all cute. I hope this will add to the
blog’s appeal as will the choice of colour (green) and vegetable background.
Above all it should be easy to negotiate and read.
Jill Walker Rettberg describes
blogs as a “social genre” that support communication through smaller dense
networks that are linked haphazardly in contrast to the more common one to many
style of communication of mass media. (Walker Rettberg, 2008, p57) This social
nature of blogging is appealing, allowing people to connect to as many or as
few people as they wish and indicating their community of choice which Blood
describes as “positioning” themselves within a community (Blood, 2008). Blogging not only supports this sense of
community, it also allows an informal way of speaking which can help me to develop a friendly, helpful style through
which I can share my experiences as a vegetarian. Resource sharing is a
hallmark of this community (as with many others) and blogs and sites with
recipes and resources abound. Creating a blog offers the opportunity to share
the resources that I have found of value in the past and can connect me with
further resources as I in turn follow other bloggers. In this way informal
connections are made between a community of people who are in other ways
unconnected.
Blogger is a web 2.0 tool that
allows a blog to be easily designed and created without an understanding of
coding and was chosen primarily because I have used it before and am familiar
with its functionality and flexibility. Rebecca Blood has attributed the
development of Blogger and other blog creation tools with a change in focus and
the nature of blogging from connection to information and lists of other blogs
to the journal style that has proliferated over the last ten years. These
platforms allow inclusion of information in an interface that is easy to use so
adding posts can be done at any time. (Blood, 2008). Lack of restrictions on
content, ease of use and the ability to link to other web sites and blogs means
anything can written about, at anytime and can be supported by members of a
like minded community that are just a click away. This blog contains links to
other blogs that may be of interest or offer further information to potential blog
readers. It also has links to other instances of my online presence in
Delicious, Flickr, Twitter and an old favourite , Library Thing.
Delicious is a tool that is used to organise webpages visited by a particular user. It has been described as ““a social bookmarks manager. It allows you to easily add sites you like to your personal collection of links, to categorize those sites with keywords, and to share your collection not only between your own browsers and machines, but also with others”(Schacter as cited in Mathes, 2004). In this instance, Delicious works well as a way of sharing potentially useful information with blog readers without having to individually post all the sites I visit to the blog itself. Using Delicious will allow potentially useful websites to be identified that have alreadybeen searched for, reviewed and rated so new users of this information can find resources easily. This supports blog’s purpose of sharing information.
Using Delicious, links can be
sorted into “stacks” of links to sites of similar topics. This categorising
function allows blog readers to go directly to the information that is valuable
to them and tagging also helps to identify potential sites of interest. The
number and nature of tags applied to identify content can narrow down searching
across the stacks. Using tags that are created and applied directly by the user
rather than having a predetermined taxonomy allows the creator to use their own
vocabulary reflecting their choices of terms that may be more useful to the
particular community the information is likely to appeal to. (Mathes, 2004) Tagging
produces folksonomies, rather than taxonomies that are an “organic system of
classification” (Mathes, 2004) that can offer a multitude of ways to describe
and access information about different subjects.
Flickr has been chosen for a
similar reason in that it allows tagging and easy searching of categorised
content. Choosing Flickr has allowed the blog to reflect the importance of food
choices in the theme offering photographs of dishes and foods that can be
included in a vegetarian or vegan diet. It also allows me to express myself a
little more, show a little more of myself than the Delicious link by displaying
food preferences strongly. I have also been a direct contributor to the content
as it has come from my own photograph collections and much of it is made by me.
The few photographs that have currently been included do show my predisposition
towards sweets!
Having a Twitter account attached
allows me to extend access to my web presence and further spaces of potential
interest to blog readers. Having a Twitter account allows me to express views,
post information about myself and my interests that may be less connected with
the themes expressed in the blog (find a bit on twitter or networking).
All the tools used to produce
this web presence have allowed me to connect to a community in a social sense
fitting with Boyd and Ellison’s (Boyd and Ellison, definitions of social
networking. I am able to define a profile and identify others with whom I have
a connection – in this case other vegetarians or vegans – and made my
connections visible for others to negotiate. So while my aim to share
information has been begun and supported through the mediums I have chosen, I
have also contributed to my own social connections on line.
Blood, R 2000. Weblogs: a history and perspective Rebecca’s
Pocket
retrieved 13th May 2012 from http://www.rebeccablood.net/essays/weblog_history.html
retrieved 13th May 2012 from http://www.rebeccablood.net/essays/weblog_history.html
Boyd, D. M., & Ellison, N. B. (2007). Social network sites: Definition,
history, and scholarship. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 13(1). Retrieved
11th May 2012 from http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1083-6101.2007.00393.x/full
Mathes, A 2004 Folksonomies -
Cooperative Classification and Communication Through Shared Metadata retrieved
7th May 2012 from http://www.adammathes.com/academic/ computer-mediated-communication/folksonomies.html
Rettberg, J., (2008),
Blogs, Communities and Networks in Blogging. Polity
Press; Cambridge. Retrieved 20th March 2012 from http://edocs.library.curtin.edu.au/
