My web presence has been developed around the themes of science and skepticism and I have chosen Blogger as my central node and am supporting it with nodes on Delicious, Picasa Web and Youtube. I decided very early that I would use a blog as my central node for no more practical reason than I enjoy writing and felt that most other social web platforms would be too abbreviated for a central node.
I was happy to choose Blogger, as one of the platforms suggested in our lectures for its ease of use. I have had some experience with it before and feel that it is a simple and reliable system. To help keep this web presence project compartmentalised it also helped me to have a central and connecting nodes that could be accessed easily and Blogger, Picasa Web and Youtube are all Google owned platforms and can be logged into using the same Google username and password. It is also the case that I can do the same with Delicious which allows you to login via a Google account. These nodes also have the virtue of having the same username associated with them to help tie the theme and online persona together.
I have chosen a template which is a fairly typical two column design with tabs across the top for my “about” and “exegesis” pages. This allows me to have a main body column on the left where my blog posts are published and a secondary navigation column for my blog archives, blog roll and supporting nodes. Aside from styling the template with an astronomy background to match my science theme, the only design change that was made was to widen the secondary column to take advantage of modern screen sizes. This makes it practical to have widgets instead of simple text links for my contributing nodes (i.e. a column wide enough to make an embedded Youtube channel worthwhile).
My first choice of supporting node was the Delicious bookmarking service. I chose this as a node so I could make use of the Web 2.0 concept of a folksonomy. I find user shared or classified content to be a fascinating way to discover new information and I am drawn to its egalitarian principles. It would be too strongly put to say, as Weinberger (2006) argues that I want to “stick it to The Man”, but I do like being guided by the larger web community and my own use of tags is as Mathes (2004) describes as “genre or form descriptors”.
I also wanted to be able to make a clear distinction of links between my blogroll for blogs or websites that I like and individual pages that I want to link to which may be on a web site I have no special affinity for.
My second choice of supporting node was Youtube. In the topic area I have chosen there is a wealth of Youtube material that I would like to share and I know from previous experience how easy it is to embed a Youtube channel into a blog. The specific benefit I see in adding a Youtube channel is in the social networking features. The channel comments feature and the like/don’t like buttons are analogous to a Facebook wall and “liking” items or comments posted to Facebook. This adds some familiar elements to encourage dialog. I was also able to theme my Youtube channel with another astronomy image to help indentify it with my central node.
My third and final supporting node is the Picasa Web photo sharing platform. Initially I intended to use Flikr for the simple reason that I had never tried it before and wanted to test it. However I switched to Picasa Web after realising that it has particularly tight integration with Blogger.
I want to sum up my choice of Blog as central node by observing that in choosing a traditional blog layout I have made the blog easy to navigate and have themed it strongly to identify with my choice of subject. My supporting nodes offer a lot of enrichment to the visitor with multimedia and social networking features incorporated to encourage a participatory experience. I have reduced the practical challenges to myself by referencing material which is the property of others via Delicious, Youtube and in my blog posts and thus avoiding any conflict on copyright.
The exercise has been a valuable on for me in terms of learning how a social media strategy and a more complete online persona or profile can drive visitors towards my blog. Although I did not use Facebook as one of my nodes a friend saw a post of mine that she liked and linked to it from her Facebook wall and this particular post remains far above all of my others in terms of page visits. From what I can tell from site statistics almost all of my traffic has come from platforms where I have a profile of sorts (including Curtin’s Blackboard).
References
Mathes, A. (2004). Folksonomies – Cooperative Classification and Communication Through Shared Metadata. Retrieved from http://www.adammathes.com/academic/computer-mediated-communication/folksonomies.html
Weinberger, D (2006) . Folksonomy as Symbol. Retrieved from http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/node/3281
