Blogging to me is...

Blogging to me, is like a digital diary. I can share my thoughts, what I’ve done, what I’ve seen etc. And most importantly, I can do that on a computer with just a finger touch! I can publish my work to the public (of course I can have the control of what I allow people to see :]) Throughout this blogging experience, I have learnt things, and the best part is that, I know that somebody is reading my post, which doesn’t seem like I am talking to myself (which is awful!)

I once kept a diary in my primary school, it was like, expressing all my thought to the paper, and it really felt good at that time. Time flies, with the massive use of digital devices, I turned to be using Xanga in secondary school, my classmates and I formed a blogging community with gossiping and academic works combined. I stopped blogging when I was attending HKCEE. Since then, blogging was not part of my life. Fortunately in this course, I can find back my interest towards blogging, and I really enjoy it.

I once thought that blogging is just merely a leisure activity which I can write what I want, that is transforming my thought into words, and then write them all out. But now when I attend this course, I realized that blogging is more than leisure, more than anything that I can imagine.

In my first post, I talked about my digital life, which is all about Facebook and Apple, as I am a smartphone user and frequent Facebook user. For some reason, smartphones become people’s live nowadays, you can see people poking their smartphones screen quite hard in the bus, sticking their faces on the screen in MTR, or whatever. They spent their commuting time with their smartphones, texting, browsing the Net, playing games etc. This kind of culture arises with the widespread of touch screen smartphones, which is very interesting in some sense.

In my second post, I talked about microblogging, which is a brand-new blogging device which contains less words and less content. It is related to my first post about Facebook, as Facebook is the best example for microblogging. I had also introduced other kinds of micro-blogging devices, like Weibo (the China twitter), Twitter, Google +, Plurk and Tumblr, illustrating the widespread of microblogging at the same time. Also, I also talked about the importance of writing in new media. As new media do bring people closer than before, and with commenting and participating, it does innovate quite a lot.

In my third post, I mentioned about the credibility of microblogging devices, I mean whether the message of the microblogging tool is delivering is genuine or not. And there is a rising importance of citizen journalism at the same time, and people should look into it in detail.

The thing that this blogging experience teaches me is that, I have to think before I write. As I have said before, I once thought that blogging is just only for leisure, and I write what I thought. But in  this blogging experience, I have to look into the issues in writing for new media, and reflect on it. In order to do this, I need to do some preparation work first, like constructing mind maps, brainstorming etc. Normally I won't do things like drafting, mindmaps, but it's different now. So I believe this is quite different from what I have done for my past blogging experience.


Apart from this, I learnt what is multimodality and hypertexts, which is two of the features of Web 2.0 tool. With quoting people's posts, linking others' posts etc, in some sense, I am practicing multimodality in order to make my blogging more interesting and readble. Also, I can act as a creator, a publisher and also a reader at the same time. I create and publish my own thoughts, then I also be the readers of other people's blogs. Using hypertexts in blogs are the things I haven't tried before until I am attending this course. Hypertexts definitely can convey messages in a different way, which is more interesting than just plain texts.

Thanks everyone who have read or commented on my post, I really appreciate what you have done, you guys bring new ideas to me , which I may have never heard of. And most importantly, enlighten me to new persprectives to analyse issues.  It's my pleasure to have you all as my audience, wish to see you all in the future :)

Last but not least, let me once remind you the fun of blogging through this video (we saw this already on the lesson but still I want to share it to all of you), enjoy!

P.S Here are the comments that I've made on my own post (here, here and here), on Emily's (here, here and here) on Noc's (here, here and here), King's and Kandice's.