New Forms of Media Publishing.

According to Webopedia, the old media can be referred to the old prints such newspapers, magazines and books while the new media can be seen such as blogs, online forums and many more. Naughton(2006) said that every old media was once a new media, but as we can all see, the so-called "old" media is still thriving and is sometimes even considered to be better than the new media.

The new media has sped up the communication compared to the old media. For example, the bombing of The World Trade Centre, news travelled faster through the use of digital cameras, mobile phones and the internet. These new media's has changes, in a way how fast communication can travel now.  Thanks to the form of media such as Twitter, facebook and blogs, this has caused the world of journalism to lose its readers as now people are living in a world where time is of the essence and therefore opt for a much faster and efficient media.
The issue that is happening to the new media now is censorship problems. Even with the new form of media, we are still limited to what the government want or do not want us to say. The old media has the printing and publishing law and the new media such as the internet has the censorship problem. A very good example is blogger Raja Petra who was sentenced to jail for writing something that has angered the government. In conclusion, there is no such thing as the freedom of speech.

Loone,S, 2008,"Blogger Raja Petra Goes to Jail for Altantuya,"Sloone.wordpress.com, viewed 30 September 2010, < http://sloone.wordpress.com/2008/05/06/be-there-for-raja-petra-tomorrow/ >

New  Media,webopedia.com, viewed 30 September 2010, < http://www.webopedia.com/TERM/N/new_media.html >

Naughton, J 2006, Blogging and the emerging media ecosystem, Reuterinstitue, viewed 30 September 2010, http://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/fileadmin/documents/discussion/blogging.pdf.

Blogging Community.

A blogging community is where an individual feels a sense of belonging, membership, the influence of others, the emotional connection that is shared within the community and the integration and fulfilling the need of one another(Blanchard 2004). A community is where people gather with a common goal, a shared interest and meet in a place where everyone gather with the same passion(Vinson 2006).

 According to eHow.com, one should expand  and enlarge one's circle of blogs by reading other people's blog and leaving comments on the blogs. Next, each postings on the blog should be interesting and captivating to capture the interest of the readers, therefore building a blog community. As suggested, besides leaving comments and replies, one should leave their own signature link so that other people are able to find and read your blog and in a way, expanding the blogging community. According to White(2006), she mentioned that with the technologies such as blogrings and by having key words, these help people with the same interest to be able to connect and therefore enlarging the blog community.

There are many types of blogging communities which are popular with many such as food blogging community, the photography community and fashion communites. The example of a blog community that I have is a food community such as the Small Small Baker's blog. According to White(2006), this is a topic Centric blog where this is a community which is linked by the same interest and the subject and membership is the network boundary.


White, N 2006, Blogs and community - launching a new paradigm for online community?, The Knowledge Tree, viewed 29 September 2010, http://kt.flexiblelearning.net.au/tkt2006/edition-11-editorial/blogs-and-community-%E2%80%93-launching-a-new-paradigm-for-online-community.

How to Build a Blogging Community, eHow.com, viewed 29 September 2010, <http://www.ehow.com/how_2152382_build-blogging-community.html >

Blanchard,A, 2004,"Blogs as Virtual Communities:Identifying a Sense of Community in the Julie/Julia Project",Into the Blogosphere, viewed 30 September 2010, < http://blog.lib.umn.edu/blogosphere/blogs_as_virtual.html#comments1 >

Vinson,J, 2006, "Blogging and Communities",Knowledge Jolt with Jack, viewed 30 September 2010,
< http://blog.jackvinson.com/archives/2006/06/26/blogging_and_communities.html >

Blogs Classification.

Just like fashion, blogs have different styles and classifications. According to McLean,2009, bloggers/ a person who has a blog can be classified into a few categories based on what they write about and how often the blog. First of all, there are the hobbyists in which these people blog about their lives, hobbies or to voice out their opinions about something. These kind of bloggers make up the majority of the blogging world in which their sole purpose in blogging is for the fun and entertainment. The name for this blog as some put it is called the Exhibition blog(Simons,2008).

Next there is the kind of blog that called the advertisement blog where these blogs make it their main purpose is to advertise something, a product, food or even places which they recommend to travel. Besides that, there is a news blog which has information about the latest news, happenings and media conferences(Simons,2008).Such examples that are available in our country is the Malaysian Insider and Malaysia Kini while there are newspaper blogs in other countries which are quite well known is The Big Picture, Washington Wire and many more(Owens,2009).

In my opinion, blogs can be categorised into personal or impersonal/neutral blogs, political and non-political, entertainment or academic blogs. In a personal blog, there are postings about your daily life, friends and things happening around your personal life. A neutral blog is a blog about almost anything from how good the weather is today to how you saw a cat cross the street.  Political blogs are blogs about politics and the government. Entertainment blogs are about fashion, lifestyle and to the newest and latest gadgets while an academic blog is where one can learn and glean useful information from.

References

McLean,J,2009, "State of the Blogosphere 2009 Introduction, Technorati.com, viewed 28 September 2010, < http://technorati.com/blogging/article/state-of-the-blogosphere-2009-introduction/ >

The Media Report, 2008, A taxonomy of blogs, ABC.com, viewed 25 September 2010, http://www.abc.net.au/rn/mediareport/stories/2008/2372882.htm.

Owens,S, 2009, "The 50 Most Popular Newspaper blogs",Bloggasm.com, viewed 27 September 2010, < http://bloggasm.com/the-50-most-popular-newspaper-blogs >

Blogs as a current phenomenon and the benefits to community.

First of all, in this era of advanced technology, it comes as no surprise that almost everyone that you meet on the street has a blog. What is blogging you may ask, well to put it in simple terms,  Blogging is like a diary, except that it is done online and on a website where anyone can access it unless the blog has been privatized.  

Blogging is now a current phenomenon with people of all kinds of ages and from all over the world having a blog. Each year, the size of the blogosphere increases dramatically and is expending from one end of the world to another.The size of the blogosphere recorded is 133 million which was in the year 2002 but it will have increased a lot more in the past few years(Technorati,2002).

In Malaysia, it has been known to many that there are restrictions to how one can freely express themselves. Due to the many laws imposed onto the citizens, many Malaysian's have to voice out their opinions online which turned out  to be restricted as well. In 2008, Raja Petra Kamarudin was jailed for allegedly causing racial tensions in his blog(Joshi,2008). Therefore, we can conclude that in Malaysia, most of the blog trends are to voice out their dissatisfaction and discontent in the government and many other things but there are many blogs pertaining other things such as food related blogs which are growing to bigger numbers. 

References

Joshi,V, 2008, "Malaysian Blogger jailed for 2 years",The Independent, viewed 14 September 2010,

< http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/malaysian-blogger-jailed-for-2-years-939340.html >

Winn, P, 2009, "State of the Blogosphere:Introduction", Technorati, viewed 16 September 2010,

< http://technorati.com/blogging/article/state-of-the-blogosphere-introduction/ >