90's blog progress

Although I'm coming along and coming into my own a bit with my blog, which is saying something considering that I had no experience with blogging before, I am finding that it is somewhat difficult to keep concise and focused without wandering in my thoughts and adding an abundance of pictures. I know that the point of a blog is to cater to yourself--that being the point of an enthusiast blog, to do things how you want to--but still, it can be a challenge to condense and trim down content to be mindful of the audience.

In particular, my most recent post, A Matter of Perspective, I cut down and cut out content several times and still feel that I wandered and wasn't very strong in my focus and point. I'm grateful that we can edit posts even after posting them, it makes things much easier and is very useful to be able to go back and reword or reformat a post.

In general, though, I'm enjoying this project and the experience that comes along with blogging; I've never written something for an audience and actually seen results and gotten feedback this way before, and to be able to create and maintain something that is my own is a very unique and gratifying feeling. Even though I've already completed a third of the number of required posts for this class, I look forward to maintaining my blog, building and engaging with my audience, and enjoying and sharing the experience, both of my blog and my memories of the 1990s. Even though assignment 1 is wrapping up, I plan on continuing my blog long after this semester is over, and doing my best to maintain it in a friendly, engaging, and well-written presentation. Wish me luck.

In-class Blog Review

So, yesterday I went into class expecting the peer blog review to be a group chat that would be a bit uninspired, a bit awkward, and maybe if I was lucky, I would get a useful piece of advice or two out of it so I could better gear my Enthusiast blog toward the audience. I've never really been very helpful at critical peer review, I usually don't see any big problems aside from grammar and syntax. I guess I'm just nice that way. But anyway, it turns out it wasn't like that at all; when I showed my blog to the group I was in, I got a far better response than I had anticipated.

I really wasn't sure what would happen when I showed my blog to whichever group I wound up in, maybe they'd be mildly interested and give me a useful bit of advice or two, or maybe they wouldn't have too much to say at all. I was psyched to find out that the people in my group really enjoyed my blog and thought it was a great idea. I'd been having a pretty good time posting entries in the blog myself, but the group response has made me much more confident and happier with my blogging. Granted, I received a lot more praise than advice (but since when is that bad? Never!), so I only have a couple ideas of what to do to modify my blog as a whole, but I look forward to posting future entries confidently and enjoying myself while I do so. I also look forward to improving how my personality comes through in my blogging and helping that along by posting personal entries (personal memories and whatnot), and generally allowing myself to come through to the audience more.

Here's hoping I'll get an even bigger audience and more positive reviews!

Progress on Psyche! (Project 1)

Well, so far creating an enthusiast blog has been interesting and enjoyable, and though it is time-consuming, creating a post that will hopefully interest and entertain the audience, it is quite satisfying viewing the results of each post.

So far feedback has been quite positive, and the criticisms stem from the same facet of my posts-their length. I will be putting more effort into keeping my posts informative and intresting but concise, because a long post is quite a turn off for more than a few readers.

Also, it has been suggested a few times that each post should probably stick to one 90's aspect and explore it in-depth before moving on to another post and another topic. My reason for including multiple topics in my post thus far has been because there are literally hundreds of different topics to potentially write about, and only so much time I can commit to posting for the class. Though I would like to dedicate a full post to every topic I have in mind, I would need to find a way to post dozens of updates without overwhelming the audience. And while I am aware that 12 posts over the course of the semester is not the maximum limit, at the moment it isn't practical for me to consider going very far over that number. I will let my audience decide what they would most like to see, and do my best to serve them as well as myself.

Enthusiast ethos

My credibility as the author of a 90's blog stems chiefly from the fact that I grew up in the 90's; it was my childhood, the decade that defined my culture and who I am as a person. As such, I have experienced many aspects of the decade from an intimate point of view, and hold extensive knowledge of many facets of the culture of the decade. Of course I plan to present my knowledge in an accessible and entertaining way, so that my blog doesn't simply rattle off various facts and trivia, but engages my audience.

Granted, given my age and place as part of a generation that grew up during the 1990's, there are literally hundreds of thousands of people who could hold an equal or even a greater amount of credibility on the subject of the 90's, and I don't dispute that fact. Regardless, I do hold a passion for the decade I grew up in and hope to create and maintain a blog that is enjoyable for me to head and my audience to read, and which allows both parties to remember and appreciate the decade we grew up in.

Enthusiast Blog

The topic I settled on for my enthusiast blog is 1990's (U.S.) culture; as a whole, this topic is probably a bit broad to work with, at least at first. But as a member of Generation Y (born ~ late 70's - ~ early 90's), more specifically, a child of the 90's, I have many ideas of the kind of posts I will make in my blog. Main ideas would be reflection on popular movies and television, music, trends, people, events, and so on. The biggest problem I anticipate with this is organization and a main idea or theme for each post. Since I have an abundance of knowledge of the 90's, I feel that this topic won't be so broad as to be unwieldly, but won't be too specific either as I'm not concentrating on one partciular facet of 90's (although 90's movies itself isn't too narrow a subject, either).

The majority of the audience that I aim to serve through my blog are my coevals (ha ha, a $10 word! Note - coeval: member of the same generation/person of approximately the same age). What I hope to accomplish with my audience is creating a sense of nostalgia and fond recollections of popular culture while they were growing up. I hope that the content of what I post will be things that the audience will find enjoyable and will want to see and read about, and reminisce about. People who aren't typically prone to nostalgia or who weren't fond of the 90's would probably not be thrilled with the kind of content I plan on posting, but I hope and plan on serving my audience well with posts about things remembered from a childhood in the same decade.

Since I aim to make people reminisce about their experiences while growing up, there's naturally going to be an air of nostalgia and fondness for the material being highlighted in my posts. But I also plan on "conversing" with the audience in a relatable way, with a knowledgable but casual, everyman kind of manner. This is something I've been able to accomplish occasionally in my writing, and I found the effect on the readers was quite pleasing-creating a feeling of familiarity and actual, casual conversation. If I'm able to reproduce this manner in my blog, I will be very pleased, and I hope the readers will be as well.
The design on my blog is not something I'm positive about yet...writing is my forte, design is not. My plan is for a design with a casual, comfortable feeling, nothing too serious or intimidating-that isn't the point of the blog. I want the ethos of the blog to be informed but friendly and engaging, and conducive to feelings of fondness and camraderie as part of a generation.

Possible Titles:
A Blog About Nothing
Show Me The 90s
Psyche! The 1990s All Over Again


Post Ideas:
See Paragraph 1, sentence 3. No spoilers yet!

Enthusiast blog possibilities

1. music related (music news? popular/underrated/new artists? music programs/sites?)
2. interesting cracked.com articles
3. more important news than celebrity going-ons
4. movies I don't like because they confuse me (warning: spoilers)
5. guilty pleasures

I really, really hope I can figure out a way to make any of these ideas function on a consistent basis.

Blog clubs

Stefanac starts her chapter acknowledging the drawback of enthusiast blogs (generally, that they will go unseen and unappreciated by the blog-viewing public) before bringing her point around to an encouraging tutorial for creating an interesting and reader-friendly (rehetoric!) blog atmosphere. As one personally at a bit of a loss for what my own enthusiast blog will be about, her words are somewhat reassuring. Her references to Mr. Jalopy's blogs and small section dedicated to showcasing several other blog sites gave plenty of examples of topic-based blogs, so I've got plenty of models to pick apart and use. At the moment, though, my pressing concern is picking a suitable interest that I can actually maintain a steady blog about for several months. I have a few ideas (see next post), but nothing concrete. Regardless of what I pick, though, I'm sure Stefanac's advice will prove to be quiet helpful for me once I settle on a damn topic!

Blogging experience

I can't say a lot about blogging in general since I'm new to it. I have read a few blogs by different people (band members, website owners, etc) to pass time or out of curiosity, but don't really follow any. I don't usually care. The concept of a blog is pretty easy to get, even without having used one before. It's a digital journal, basically. I never really have been one to write my thoughts or feelings down for too much more than completing an assignment, though everyone doodles from time to time. For better or worse, I've typically been the type to bottle those things up =) . But this being my first blogging experience as the blogger, and the seemingly easy to use system here on Blogger, I think my experiences with it in the future will be positive. And I may or may not set up another blog somewhere after I'm done with this one, but that has yet to be decided.
That's all for now!

What is Writing?

Writing is a way of communicating to serve a wide variety of purposes, be it expressing thoughts and beliefs or providing information to an audience. But regardless of the purpose for it, writing is leaving a record of a thought, a bit of information, even the fact of existing at all, for someone, somewhere, at some time, to read.

- My room

- Living room

- Libraries

I can write in most places, but preferably a place that is quiet and without too many people is best for my being able to concentrate. I'm not picky, but I usually stick to the same places out of habit.

Rebecca's Weblog History

http://www.rebeccablood.net/essays/weblog_history.html

Wow. Reading that was exhausting. I never did know where blogs came from, they just kind of forced themselves into the edges of my awareness until I actually saw some. But now that I've read the full history of blogs from inception to the turn of the century, I find myself wondering some things about their evolution.

Granted, every outlet of expression and information sharing goes through its share of changes in format and focus, but I can't see why the original blogs, weblogs, were left to toil in general obscurity so soon after they caught the computer-user's eye. The way that weblogs operated, providing a link to a webpage dedicated to specific information and including a contribution from the blogger, just seems so practical and objective. I imagine they became underappreciated with the advent of personal blogs, but even so, it seems a shame to me that so much objective material got shoved into the background of the World Wide Web. I think that the websurfing public could benefit greatly from sites so conducive to critical-thinking, as opposed to the media machines that pump out national trivia every 8 hours (read: MSN, AOL, Yahoo).

There will undoubtedly be many more changes in information sharing format over the next few years, and the way public internet users find information online may be entirely foreign to me by the time I graduate. This is quite an alarming thought, and not one I will readily accept when that time comes. With the rate of technological developments, my generation will soon be forced to adapt or be doomed to the tech-challenged reputation reserved for stubborn parents and grandparents of today before very long. The ultimatum leaves only one option to today's youth. As students in the age of technology, my peers and I must accept and adapt to change in online operations in order to survive in an ever-changing technological job market.