Importance of Blogs

Chapter 2 of Journalism Next covers the importance blogging in today’s digital age.  I personally have failed at keeping up my blogs but I do know the importance of blogs.  It is a great way to build an audience even before you graduate and enter the work force as a journalist.  The good thing about blogs is that there are so many different topics that you can choose to concentrate your blog on and it would still be relevant experience for a journalism career.  The chapter said that many reporters nowadays also keep a blog on the side that helps them maintain their audience and also helps them with their stories.

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After reading this chapter, I definitely know that I need to go back and start up my blog again.  One thing that people forget about blogs is that it is hard work to maintain.  I definitely underestimated the amount of work it took when I started my blog.  You have to constantly come up with material to post and write it in such a way that relates to the general audience.

 

One great thing about blogs is that you are free to take any tone that you feel like using in your blogs.  It is not formal news.  As a matter of fact the more relaxing your tone is, the greater the audience you pull in.

 

I vow to start my blog again before the end of the semester… (BTW its about being young in the city, many lifestyle pieces and love and relationship trauma pieces. Wish me luck)

 

 

Insta Insta Instagram

My last stop on my social media-learning quest is Instagram.

news.doddleme.com

 

I was most excited to view the Instagram presentation.  It has grown to be my absolute favorite social media-networking site.  It is a way for people to give others a little insight into their world through pictures and videos, even quotes and funny grams.

I knew a little bit bout instagram going into this presentation but not nearly as much as I did about Facebook and Twitter.  I knew mainly only how to operate instagram, which the presenters did a good job at showing as well.

 

They delved into the history of instagram in a fun and cute manner.  I didn’t know who the creator of instagram was and thanks to the presentation, I do now.   I also didn’t know that it was created in 2010 and that it generated over 100 million users in less than a year of it being up.  I knew that it was a fairly young social media medium but I thought it came out maybe in 2011 because that was when I started really noticing it.  The number of users it generated in that first year is also mind boggling because it was only available to iPhone users in the first couple of years of its existence.

I feel like they could’ve also broken up its history a little bit more into a timeline because like I previously stated, Instagram was only available to iPhone users when it was first created.  They did not state that it became available to android users in 2012 and officially became available to windows users for free in 2013.

They talked about the Instagram Direct function but they did not note that it became available to its users in November 2013.

They also did not state that Instagram did not always have video.  The video function became available in instagram in the summer of 2013.

The presentation did a great job at showing the interface of the app and the site.  They explained what each tab in instagram was used for and they showed how to operate it.

I wish they did say when instagram developed a website online for people to actually visit because for a long time it was only an app for mobile devices.

All in All instagram is still a young and growing app and site and many features are yet to be made and released.  For what it is, the presenters did what they could but it could’ve been a little better.

FaceBooking

http://www.webpronews.com

Continuing on my social media tours, the next presentation I listened to was the one about Facebook.   Now, much like twitter, I believed that I knew everything about Facebook. And unlike Twitter and Google, I knew, for sure, that I was very knowledgeable about the history of Facebook because I saw “The Social Network,” which is a film about the creation of Facebook by Mark Zuckerberg.

money.cnn.com

So going into the presentation, I was excited to see what they could possibly teach me about this site that I have been using for over 6 years. I was confident that in my knowledge.

They first spoke on the history, and I basically knew 95 percent of what was said.  I even had a ballpark figure about the net worth of the company and I was fairly close to the number they gave in the presentation, which was $125.5 billion dollars.

 

Tweet Tweet!!

http://www.artensoft.com

I just viewed a presentation about twitter.  Much like the Google presentation, I felt like OK, I know Twitter.  The way that the presentation was set up, I feel like I did know most of what I needed to know about twitter.

They talked about the history of twitter, which was about the most new information that I gained from viewing this PowerPoint Presentation.  They talked about the four men that worked together to create twitter.  They spoke about the first tweet, which was sent out by Jack Dorsey, one of the four men who created twitter.  I also thought it was interesting that even though he sent out the tweet, Noah Glass was more invested in the twitter brand than Dorsey.

After this new information about twitter, I was excited to learn more new information, but I didn’t really get much else from the presentation.  I expected as much but I feel like if the presenters did more to make the presentation more snazzy, at least it would have been fun to see what I already knew about twitter.  More videos and clips could’ve made the presentation fun.

This goes back to what I said in a previous post.  Making things visually compelling, attracts more interest and viewership, regardless of what you’re selling or talking about.

Google

I just saw a class presentation about Google. When I saw the title of the presentation, I thought to myself, what could they possibly say about Google that I, or most people, don’t already know? Well, the answer is A Whole Lot.

The first part of my new knowledge about Google was the history. The presenters took us all the way back to when the founders met and everything that they have done to enhance Google till now. They put a time stamp on everything. I thought I knew the order of the new Google updates and inventions, but I quickly learned that I did not. I also was impressed at the statistics of users that they included. I never would’ve thought that Google+ was the second largest social media forum that was used in the world today. I always thought it was Facebook, then twitter, then instagram. You know, like most of us young folks use.

hipgenius.com

I want to talk more about the Google+ aspect of Google. Like a lot of people, I have a Gmail account and I always see people inviting me to join their circle in Google+ and many more, but I always ignore it. Mainly because I feel like I can deal with another social media website, but this presentation really opened my eyes to exactly what Google+ is and what it can do. I didn’t know that the circles meant having the ability to separate your followers and editing who can see what. Why doesn’t Facebook have this feature again? I also didn’t know that through Google+ and Hangouts you could just have a group video conversation with as many people you want in the conversation. Why doesn’t Google advertise this more???

I never bothered to deal with or look at Google+ but this really opened my eyes to it and now I am more willing to use this social media site. (They have sucked me in smh).