Akhbar The Star dalam ruangan teknologi menarik minat aku membacanya. Ia berkenaan tentang Blog, sepertimana yang anda lihat sekarang. Kewujudan Blog sudah dilihat sebagai agenda profesional bagi golongan korporat dan perniagaan dalam meningkatkan nilai pasaran mereka. Malah dari sudut kehidupan, individu ia memberi implikasi yang cukup besar dalam pembentukan masa hadapannya. Ada juga yang dibuang kerja apabila kisah di dalam blognya menjadi bacaan pihak atasan, secara tidak langsung diri penulis berkenaan dijadikana sasaran oemecatan mereka apabila timbul kritikan dan gesaan terhadap syarikat tersebut. Aku sertakan bersama keratan akhbar maya The Star bertarikh 23 Julai 2005 agar semua pengunjung blok boleh memikirkan sesuatu yang menarik dengan blog milik mereka
Doing your own thing
Blogging and podcasting explained
BY H. AMIR KHALID
Blogging and podcasting explained
BY H. AMIR KHALID
TWO fairly recent innovations of the Internet age are blogging and podcasting. Blogging, an updated form of public diary-keeping, has seen an explosion of people emulating Samuel Pepys, the 17th century diarist. All these people add to (or subtract from, depending on your opinion of a particular blogger) the rich feast of public discourse that is the World Wide Web.
Podcasting, meanwhile, promises to make a broadcaster out of anyone with an internet connection, a soundcard and a microphone.
Blogging is by its nature a highly idiosyncratic activity. Web-loggers “blog” at their own pace, several times a day, daily, weekly, or monthly. They make their blog entries as long – or as short – as they please. A blog entry might contain only two or three paragraphs of text; or it might contain pages and pages. Some blogs are little more than series of photographs with captions. Others consist of video and/or audio clips.
A blog’s content might be aimed at the blogger’s family and close friends only. Or at those who share a particular hobby, or interest, or political inclination. Or at fellow professionals, or at fellow office drones. Or by attention-seekers or busybodies (but let’s not go into that).
Serious bloggers can devote four or five hours a day to the activity. Not all of it is spent actually writing or creating visuals; much of it is spent reading and responding to feedback, to gathering news and information that might be of interest to the blogger’s readers. It always helps to have content to put in one’s blog.
There is no one way to create a blog. Some bloggers work alone. Some work as a team, in effect approximating an online publication. Some post contributions and feedback from subscribers or even casual readers. Some do it the old-fashioned way, creating blogs from scratch and posting them on a static website using File Transfer Protocol (FTP).
Many use blogging software such as Moveable Type, Bloxsom, Scoop or Slash, which allow for automatically archiving old posts, time and date stamping, and creating permalinks (a permanent link to another blog or website). Bloggers can choose free or paid-for software, software installed on their own machines or hosted from a remote server, depending on their needs.
The layout might be simple or complex, depending on the blogger’s enthusiasm (and talent) for working with images and graphics. Whether the blog site looks individual or generic depends on the software used and how much customisation it allows, or how much the blogger wants to bother with. More graphics and features naturally require more work. Some blogs that are part of a corporate news site conform to a corporate house style.
This article by John Hiler at the MicroContent News website (<www.microcontentnews.com/articles/blogware.htm) describes various blogging software (blogware) and which blogs each type is best suited for.
So what is podcasting, anyway? Do you have to own an iPod to receive and play a podcast? (These portable hard-disk based audio players, the Walkman of the early 21st century, go for anything from RM1,000 to a little over twice that, depending on hard disk capacity and other features.) Why should you get podcasts in the first place?
The term podcasting itself is very new, as words go: A Feb 12, 2004 article in British newspaper The Guardian is thought to be its first public use. The term combines the concept of “broadcasting” with the concept of iPod usage, which in this context means on demand, and portable – at least potentially – listening.
Podcasting is a way of publishing sound files to the Internet using the RSS 2.0 (Really Simple Syndication) protocol. The public can use an RSS feed to subscribe to a publisher of these files, automatically receiving them as they are published.
Subscribing to an RSS feed can be as simple as clicking on the RSS button on a website. Or you can use software that aggregates the RSS content, downloading files as they become available.
These audio files can then be played at your convenience, whether on your iPod or other digital audio player, or on your PC if it has the right software. You don’t necessarily need to own an iPod, despite the term. In effect, you can timeshift your radio listening the way you timeshift television watching by recording a show to watch later.
Nor are you limited to only listening to radio stations that broadcast to Malaysia – or, for that matter, to radio stations. An audio blogger who supports RSS downloads of his audio clips is in effect podcasting his audio blog.
For instance, an avid museum-goer could create his own unofficial audio museum tour guide, or a football fan could post his own runnng commentary of his favourite team’s matches.
The advantage is that you don’t have to be listening at the appointed time to catch a radio show. The disadvantage is that listener participation, such as calling in to a talk radio show or live listener surveys, is impossible – but hey, you can’t have everything.
A number of radio stations in Britain, the United States, Canada, Australia, Spain and elsewhere, have begun podcasting their shows. However, no stations in Malaysia have begun this practice as yet.
Ulasan