Exegesis


The Web Presence is aimed at allowing us to create an online presence for ourselves using particular Web 2.0 platforms. I have decided to share about fashion, style and customisation.  My web presence demonstrate what is learnt in the Web 101 unit, how to use web 2.0 tools and how to create an identity and share online. According to Helmond (2010) ‘’the web self is no longer present on one single  website, such as the personal homepage, nor  is it present on just one single social networking site.’’  So I tried to use different Web 2.0 platforms so as to share different aspect of fashion and style. I chose fashion as it is one of my passion but as I cannot buy all the stuff in magazines, I create my own fashion by having my style, making and customising my accessories and clothes.But I took in consideration that I live in Mauritius and adapted fashion to here. 

I choose to have a blog for my central node and a delicious, an online portfolio on carbonmade and a YouTube as contributing nodes. All the nodes are linked together and  the use the same user name for all nodes, that is kittyrobot,  make people recognise the nodes as belonging of my web presence as a whole.  The same profile picture was also used for each node in order to keep them recognisable. 

The choice of using a blog is because it is accessible to mass audience and it is an empty form box where the blogger can post anything (Blood, 2000). Blog is also a form of representational writing diary (Qian & Scott, 2007). Posts on blogs represent the blogger, his identity, his thoughts and his likings. So it is the ideal platform to write and share about my vision of fashion, style. It is also interactive as readers can comment and also express them on topics and I can reply, a conversation is created. I created my blog using blogger. I chose this platform as I have no experience creating blogs and the easy interface of blogger is user friendly. It enables the user to customise the appearance of the blog and post without having the knowledge of HTML. Concerning the look of the blog, it had to be simple and feminine at the same time, as the theme is about my vision of fashion and style, which is simple, feminine and chic.

The layout template is Ethereal as it tied well with my theme. But I decided to customise it. Only one background of same colour was preferable to fit with the idea of a simple and fresh blog. The colour is a light pink- orange. It is a girlie colour. For the header, I wanted something original and related to the blog title and theme. The header was generated on software online using a pattern got online under creative of commons.  That pattern goes well both with the title and the theme because in fashion we can see a lot of feather.  For the font of the blog title, a modern, young like font was used. It is white so as to be more readable on the feather pattern.  For the font of the text in the blog, I use the same kind of font. The colour of the font is orange and blue to match the header. The posts are series of photos of a chosen style. The photos are large and they show outfits and there are close up to show the details. There is only small text at the bottom to describe the photos as the main aim of the post is to show images of clothes and style. The Facebook like and share button allow readers to share the posts on Facebook and making people know about the blog.

In the about page, there is a concise explanation about the theme but also the aim the blog.  On the home page the reader can find all of the posts. The reader can navigate through the blog using the different page on the sidebar.  The sidebar classifies the posts in different categories, and by date under the archive title. There is also my blogger profile where reader can find about me. As pointed by Hua Qian and Craig R. Scott (2007), the target audience plays an important role about personal information I will provide. The blog is to share my likings and ideas to other people, so I chose not to write too much about me on my profile. Under the follow me title there are the links to my other nodes.

The first node is a YouTube because it is one of the most popular content sharing sites. The goal is to have a lot of viewers for my video and thus potentially more reader for my blog as it is linked to my YouTube.  The video posted is about customisation, another form to have your own fashion and style. In respect to copyright, the music I used is under the creative of commons. The background of the video and of my channel page is light orange so as to relate it to the blog. Other features of YouTube that are interesting are that I can add videos to my favourites and subscribe to other channels. All that can appear on my profile and people can see what I like.

The second contributing node is an online portfolio on carbonmade. There are the bags I made, in the idea of creating my own style. The online portfolio allows sharing of the work to people online. They have a view of what I do.

The third contributing node is a Delicious because it is a great platform to collect and bring together into one place different links online. It makes it easier to share them.  Delicious allows user to easily tag links but also to organize them in stacks and to associate keywords to those tags (Mathes, 2004). Content can be organised and easily access when searching on a specific topic like shoes, craft, fashion.  On my delicious I have links to tutorial about style, customisation and fashion. This platform allows me to tag and share web sites that are related to my theme.

The central node and the contributing nodes form part of a whole. They have different parts of a same theme. All platforms being linked together allow the readers to get access to other part related to fashion on different platform. The diverse platform together target more audience and permits more interaction.

Reference list:

Blood Rebecca. (2000). weblogs: a history and perspective. Retrieved from    http://www.rebeccablood.net/essays/weblog_history.html

Helmond Anne. (2010). Identity 2.0: Construction with cultural software. Retrieved from                http://www.annehelmond.nl/wordpress/wp content/uploads/2010/01/helmond_identity20_dmiconference.pdf

Mathes Adan. (2004). Folksonomies – Cooperative Classification and Communication through  Shared Metadata. Retrieved from http://www.adammathes.com/academic/computermediated-communication/folksonomies.html

Qian  Hua,Craig R. Scott. (2007). Anonymity and Self-Disclosure on Weblogs. Journal of Compute Mediated Communication, 12, 1428–1451. DOI: 10.1111/j.1083-6101.2007.00380.x





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