Blogging

I have been looking at the different ways of which blogs are used.
The main category’s I looked at where personal blogs and corporate blogs.

Typically when I think of blogs I think of some one sat at home typing into a pre set template such as Blogger or Word Press, creating almost an online diary. But through looking into different blogs you soon get a true in sight of what people use them for.
They range from online tutorials, show casing work, sharing tips, ideas, views and opinions, rating movies and music and having online discussions.

Two great examples of these are Lauren Luke who created video pod casts and posted them online of her passion/hobby for make up and colour, she showed examples and tips through her pod casts so that others could follow. She now has 3 million hits and has been offered her own makeup range.
The other great example is of a Gary Vaynerchuk who has a passion for wine and so did pod casts and entry’s about different wines, he now has celebrities featuring in his blog.

In corporate use they are used so that customers can have more a personal insight not given by their professional websites, these blogs tend to look completely different to the commercial sites where they sell products or services.
They tend to have links to groups such as twitter and social networks which you may not associate big company’s with. And can be really in formal which you may not find through their big website, such as a recent blog post I read reading: ‘sometimes we suck’ which was an apology to customers after the company’s server went down for the day. Famously they will tweet or tell us about new products coming out or updates but they have to be careful about what they are posting, recently a manager of a large company sent out a message how he was ‘dreading today, because I have to fire one of my employees’ which obviously all the employees saw online and felt on edge at work. The media got a hold of this and created a huge story about how it was unfair to post such a comment. So they have to be a little reserved when posting comments.

I use blogs as part of my course work for college as a way of featuring my work, I have mainly used blogging for a group production called ‘The Square’ where I evaluated my work and added diary entries as I went along, this helped a great deal when creating the finishing evaluation for this work and was also an additional piece of work to add in with my coursework.
I have also used a blog to act as an information guide to people using the social network JustLikeHeaven which I made for one of my younger siblings and her friends, who where wanting to use face book and Bebo but their parents weren’t allowing them to.