dispatches from nicoleistan: day 1

caught in the moment
munching on  //  milano chocolate mint cookies
eargasm  //  spurts of gunshots on Xbox 360’s Call of Duty 4
mood  //  fidgety

I never imagined that my experience using Xanga, an older blog site, would pay off eight years later.  Page layouts, visually appealing fonts & graphics, & permalinks were probably not on most middle schoolers’ minds - except me.  I suppose my interest in making websites and blogging fostered my love for journalism & just, well writing.  Of course back then, I did not know all the ‘fancy’ terminology that Suzanne Stefanac referred to in Dispatches From Blogistan.

All I knew about graphics was that they could catch my reader’s attention & enhance my story.  If a page looked organized & was easy to navigate, more people would visit & stay on my blog.  Simply linking related links to my blog & linking other people’s blogs, whose writing I also enjoyed, would provide more traffic to my page & there own.  Common sense right?

Stefanac’s book enlightened me on the most recent additions to blogging.  After middle school Xanga failed to be the ‘cool’ trend, & I soon switched to Myspace along with, what it seems like, every other teenager on the planet.  After being out of the blogging loop, her chapter ‘Anatomy of a Blog Page’ refreshed my memory.

Aside from Stefanac’s book, the two chapters from We The Media, by Dan Gillmor, gave me a fresh look on the origins of communication & the impact of the contributions of a select few.  This new look made me appreciate the aspect of journalism in a whole new level, & began to make me wonder what other little-known form of technology would further alter how we disperse news.  Ironically, a few hours before I read the chapters, I received a more concise version via lecture in my Mass Media Law class.  

Questions:

one) Based on current media trends, what do you believe will be the next evolution in how news is communicated?

two) After reading chapter 9 from Dispatches From Blogistan, which pieces of advice did you find the most useful?