My EXEGESIS (Web Presence Assignment)
I chose Tumblr for the central node of my web presence, which I have never decided to sign up before. It was important for me to engage in new ways of online communication and use platforms such as Tumblr that I had no experience with. There were three contributing nodes that I chose and had a previous experience with, which are Instagram, Twitter and YouTube channel.
These platforms that I have been using for awhile helped me to promote myself as a known dancer and fashion guy to the audience around the world. In creating this web presence, the aim was to expose myself to the people that will assist and encourage me in terms of my professionalism as an Internet communications student and also for my future career.
The title of my blog is Fashioniqua. And the reason I chose the name is because I am into fashion and I added “iqua” into the word to make it quiet unique, which is related to my personality, as I like being stand out from the others when it comes to fashion and dancing. The name of this node is not the same with my other platforms. I used a different nickname so when people search my full name, it would not directly connected to this web presence.
I decided to choose Tumblr as my blogging platform because it is pretty easy to use and also it is very customizable. I can insert some music to the node by just simply copy and paste the HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) into the SCM player code. This helps the viewers to enjoy my blog even better and understand my types of music that I listen to. And also to promote couple of my cover songs. I used the Green skin colour for the SCM player to present the positivity of my blog. Regarding the layout of the blog, I just wanted to keep it simple by using the free theme called Povouir published by ThemeCloset. The appearance makes the information easy to view and I also customized the header and background image to make it more individual. As Blood (2000) states that blogging helps people to explore own interests. Therefore, my blog is about my adventure towards future career that I want to achieve by posting my reflection on how this transition influences me.
I used Instagram as my contributing node because I can instantly update my blog by just posting photos from Instagram since it can be linked with one another. Most of my recent photos will automatically featured on the “dashboard” or newsfeed on Tumblr. Thus, by using this way of updating the central node, it will participate two platforms of social sites and together can draw attention to the viewers.
I linked Twitter as one of the contributing nodes. Twitter has the similarity with other social blogging sites, however due to the maximum of the character for users to tweet or in other word is called as “microblogging”, which Java et al. (2007) explain as “a form of blogging that lets you write brief text updates and then send them to friends and interested observers via text messaging, instant messaging (IM), email or the web”. It is an instant blogging system. The limited character size for posting on Twitter can help reduce the time for users to produce content, which makes its special than blogging (Java et al. 2007). As microblogging can be done as often as the user wants, this is making Twitter much more convenient instead of blogging as most bloggers normally update their blog every few days or less. When I do not have time to publish a blog post on the main node, I used Twitter to keep central node updated with new content.
Another contributing node that I connected through Tumblr was YouTube channel. Users might be wondering where could they watch my dance choreographies since I mentioned I am a dancer on “About” me. Therefore, I chose my YouTube channel since it is easy to share the videos from YouTube to Tumblr. When the audience shares my dance videos together with the outfit that I wore on each video, it helps my art pieces to be appreciated through online communication.
Finally, all these contributing nodes link back to the central node, which is great because I do not need to update all platforms. I can choose which nodes I need to publish and share at, and their updates are automatically included on the central node that can maintain all contents are updated.
Reference list.
Blood, Rebecca. (2000). Weblogs: A History and Perspective. [Web log post]. Retrieved from http://www.rebeccablood.net/essays/weblog_history.html
Java, Akshay, Tim Finin, Xiaodan Song, and Belle Tseng. 2007. Why We Twitter: Understanding Microblogging Usage and Communities. Proceedings of the 9th WebKDD and 1st SNA-KDD 2007, San Jose, California, USA, August 12 – 12, 2007 (pp56-65). New York, NY: Association for Computing Machinery. http://workshops.socialnetworkanalysis.info/websnakdd2007/papers/submission_21.pdf
