Week 2 Blog - Networked Media Production

Today in the lecture I learned that there is around 300 million blogs existing on the internet in the USA alone meaning that blogs are very popular because 9.5 people out of 10 have written one in figures. Although it is worth pointing out that most people would write more than one blog so the figure might be slightly less. The term applied for describing the huge network of blogs is the blogosphere. I also learned that Disintermediation means 'getting rid of the middle man', meaning that basically online newspapers and reports are much more efficient as a resource for providing news because delivery drivers, printers and newsagent clerks as well as the petrol spent on driving to the newsagents in the first place are no longer required making news reports a whole lot easier to access. I also learned that Australia is making the bold move of censoring particular sites on the internet, mainly child porn, going in the same direction as China, Iraq and South Korea who are dictatorship nations, to alleviate the recent spade of raids on homes by police on people possessing child pornography which is illegal. I learned also that RSS stands for 'Really Simple Syndication' and these come in the form of RSS feeds which are downloaded and subscribed to usually opened in Adobe Acrobat Reader allowing people to access their favourite newsletters etc. when they check their email rather than logging into the site again. Some online advertising may be integrated into this to account for the lost site hit where advertising exists on the site generating revenue for the site's owners or company. Monetize means to make money out of something as well. Sites like Technorati.com store and release the world's top 100 blogs and generally people can upload them also making the blogosphere a whole lot easier to access.

The 4 main Blog platforms are Wordpress, Typepad, Tumblr and Blogger which is run by Google and the easiest and simplest to use. They vary in form and offer different components and interfaces as well as characters or words allowed in the blog. Intellectual Property is the term used to describe Patents, which are the copyrights for new inventions, Trademarks, generally being logo's to restore originality, Designs, such as car designs to prevent replica cars being made and sold, and Copyrights themselves which are the lawful way in writing these products or work such as cd's or books can never be legally reproduced or sold although pirating does occur. Twitter.com is a very common website used to release blogs and people can easily access this on their mobile phone and keep others up to date.