website presentation - Blogs today

What is a blog? (today)

Blogs used to be an online diary where people would keep a running account of their personal lives but its function has changed in recent years.

I feel that the main reason for role and function of blog to change is because of how easy it is to set up a blog and edit or personalise it to each person's own preference. An example would be that we can easily upload photographs and video onto our blogs with websites such as Photo Bucket. Designs of blogs are also availble for free at BlogSkin. Hence, anybody who has a bit of creativity and spend a little time to learn some basic web design skills can turn their blogs into a designer's webpage.

Blogger has also 'upgraded' itself with a newer version to make blogging even more easy and private.

22 years old Wendy Cheng, a very famous and popular Singaporean blogger who’s blog receives around 16, 000 visits a day, would be the best example to show how functions of blogs evovled into what it is today. Wendy started using blog as an online dairy ( a dairy that cant be thrown away) but as her blog gains more readers, the design and function of her blog changes.

Blogger becomes celebrity

Her blog Xiaxue has been awarded the best Asian blog for three consecutive years – year 2003, 2004 and 2005 – and her blog is gaining more readers every year. Not only has her blog become famous in Asia, her blog is also slowly gaining fame internationally and because of that, Wendy has even become a celebrity in Singapore and was treated as a V.I.P in many places in Singapore.

Celebrity becomes Blogger and using Blog as a place for advertising

Another famous blogger, Xu Jing Lei, a China actress and also a director also owes her fame and success to her blog. Her blog is known to be the most visited ones in china with a count of more than 50 million visits and the visitor count is still growing in numbers rapidly. When working on her latest work Dreams May Come True, Xu detailed the film's daily progress in her blog and it has proven to be the most effective promotion for such an art house film. From these, we can see that blogs now have actually become another place or tool for self or product advertising and it is also proven to be very effective, especially with a popular blog.

Another example that is more applicable to Australia would be Jake's blog . Jake is one of the participants in the show 'Dancing on ice' and i believe that his blog does helped him a little with gaining more popularity and support. The fact that Jake actually created a weblog to blog about his participation in the show, proves that blog is no longer as simple as an online dairy.

other related links:
Blog news
Boing Boing - famous blog that looks more like a webpage of news report
Tony Pierce's Blog

ps://we were encouraged to set up a weblog to be used as our journal for this course - Web Design - and i was very shock to heard that at first. This is the main reason that lead me to think and look at the function blogs today.