Case Study 13 - one NMT activity involving audience consumption/production

Blogging

A blog literally describes a ‘web log’, where audiences produce journal-style web pages through a user-generated website.

Blogs can be used to give a commentary on any particular subject or interest to the individual, e.g.
· Food
· Politics
· Local news
· Fashion
· Travel
· Projects
· A particular job
· A hobby, or unusual occupation
· A personal, online diary

Blogs combine text, images, and links to other blogs, web pages, and other media related to its topic. Also a form of converged media - the internet allows websites to combine various media forms.

Different formats of ‘blogging’
· Photoblogs
· Sketchblogs
· Vlogs (video blogs)
· Podcasting (audio logs)
· Tumbleblogs (Blogs with shorter posts and mixed media)
· Moblog (blogs written via a mobile phone)
· Splogs (used for spamming)
· Corporate blogs

Interactivity: readers can leave comments in an interactive format on each others blogs, creating an online community, and providing smaller, niche audiences with a medium which can relate to their interests.

Popular blog websites include
· Technorati (which was tracking more than 57 million blogs in November 2006)
· MySpace (has 106 million accounts)
· Face-book (18 million members)
· Blogger

For the industries blogging is great for promotions and advertising; companies use it to give small insights into the products (for example journalists post small sections of the weekly articles, from which the full ones are only available from a specific magazine). Furthermore, the political industry are using blogs more and more to promote their parties, and reach the public on a personal level. E.g. Tom Watson a labour party MP uses his blog to keep youth involved in his political movements as a Labour MP.

For the audiences: Blogging is an amazing way to be a part of the media. Directly using the internet, its new high-speed connection rates (broadband) and its worldwide popularity, the average consumer could create a world famous webpage from a device right at their fingertips. Blogging could even become part of the audiences profession; programmes such as PayPerPost pay people to post interesting articles. Furthermore, prizes such as the LuLu ‘blooker’ prize or just general ratings and awards provided by various magazines and Newspapers (the Times, the Guardian for example) encourage people to get creative with the media and make blogs. For example, the Times tipped Xu Jinglei’s blog as one not to miss. Blogging is almost like a hobby - the audience can dip into it at their own convenience, read other people's blogs, develop their own, take it seriously or do it just for fun. Either way, the audience are not just consuming the media, but are taking it into their own hands, and are in fact creating and producing their own entertainment.

Key concepts of theory:
· Interactivity
· Niche audiences
· Immediacy
· Personalisation
· Convenience
· Democratisation
· Convergence
· Reach
· Regulation