Exegesis

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

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 20^th March 2012 from http://edocs.library.curtin.edu.au/