New ideas

Today's tutorial encouraged me to focus on something that interests me. I thought literature would be a good starting point, as I love to read and technological alternatives to books seem to be everywhere.

Even when doing the reading for this project, I found it really difficult to read large amounts of text on a computer screen.Though many full books are available online, it's not the same as reading a book in real life; many people are strongly against e-reading.


How can you have an online equivalent to this?

Via http://bookshelves.tumblr.com/

Though the internet may contain all the same information as these books (and much more) I feel that something is definitely lost. For me, having your own book that you can hold in your hands is better than looking at a bland screen of text.

Moving on

After the research part of my project proved fairly uninteresting and has not much further to go, I have decided to explore a different route.


However, the last 6 weeks have not been a waste of time:

• I learnt about the meaning, purpose and origins of technology by reading David Nye and Giorgio Agamben and researching Aristotle.
• I thought critically about the different platforms of social media and their powerful effects on society.
• I considered how visual communicators using technology to their advantage as a creative practice.
• A visit to the V&A Post-modernism show provided ideas about technology vs. real life/ real people
• Then I delved into experiments regarding blogs as online art exhibitions (displaying my own work as an example) and comparing the types of blogs available.

I revealed that you can make almost identical websites using each blog provider and that their popularity often depends more on the followers (what kind of people they are and therefore which blog site they prefer to use*) than the blog itself.
*Though I reached some interesting conclusions about this I don't think these ideas were very exciting or original.

A previous project I was involved in, organising exhibitions in unusual places.

I explored taking artwork out of context (by posting it online) and new meaning this gave to images. I was planning to compare displays of artwork in the real world and online, for example, what would the real life equivalent of a blog look like. This does not interest me enough to continue and I would prefer to work with something more personal...

Reflective statement

By using blogs as the medium through which to experiment I have showed that I understood and engaged with the brief effectively. I have researched why and how people use blogs successfully to reach a wide audience, particularly illustrators using blogs as an 'online gallery' space. I have carefully considered my own voice and concerns by making the experimental blogs personal (Rose Power Illustration) but understand that the internet is vast and it would be more interesting and relevant to now expand the project outside of my own vision. I made a start on this when I chose to involve and ask the opinions of others in my first experiment.

An extract from one of my survey responses

Though I could have been more adventurous in equipping myself with new technology I consider this relevant to the section of contemporary technology I am investigating; like me, all you need to make/view blogs is a computer and the internet. This is what makes blogs so versatile, perhaps too much so. So far I have written down ideas as soon as I think of them (attempting present the messy notes in my folder more neatly on this blog). I have continuously questioned and evaluated myself (via blog posts) and this self-critical attitude came out as a strength in the peer review. I have taken a lot of notes and made diagrams but have done very little drawing, so this is something I can embrace in Coursework 2, along with making 3d models if necessary.

If given more time, I would have liked to perform more experiments, but this is what comes next. I need to look more deeply into the meaning of images being altered when they appear on blogs and how 'blogging' could translate into the real world. Ideas for physical alternatives to blogging were going to be my 3rd experiment, and this is where I will go next, but I feel this is less of an experiment and more of a development of existing research, though more research and investigation is inevitable. I am also interested in continuing to compare Tumblr and Blogspot in terms of their typical users and their different traits.

Week 6 - results of 2nd experiment

It's time to assess which blog provider I found most 'successful'; all 3 were relatively quick and easy to make, so it comes down to which one had the most followers. Blogspot gained the most followers (15) and the Tumblr had only 4. My Wordpress site had none! After making these blogs and observing their progress over a few days, I realised there needs to be more to my project than this. While it was really useful as a research exercise to make these 3 blogs, I am not yet successful enough as an illustrator (or blogger) to be able to analyse my output on a very large scale, so I'm going to adapt the next stages/direction of my project.

Some interesting findings came from this 2nd experiment though. For example, I confirmed a realisation that came up in my 1st experiment: Wordpress is nowhere near as popular as Blogspot and Tumblr appear to be! If I am to go on comparing blogs and searching for the best, this will inevitably turn into a battle between these two blogging giants!

As a fun way of making a visual summary of this experiment (and the first) I have made a flowchart which tells you which blog would suit you best, based my findings.

3 Blogs

Here are screen shots and links to each blog, as you can see I have tried to make them look as simple and as similar as possible, to emulate the 'white space' of an art gallery and so as not to distract from the images; I tried to make this less about my work and more a space where anything could be displayed.

In order of success:


Blogspot

Tumblr

Wordpress

Week 6 - Experiment 2

I created 3 illustration blogs (on Tumblr, Wordpress and Blogspot) and documented the main differences I noticed when making them. Though I consider myself technologically challenged, I actually found them all fairly easy to use.

I'll talk about Blogspot first (the one I am most familiar with). You can log in with a Google account, which is a benefit for those who use Google mail (most people I know). The screen for composing blog posts is very straight forward and there's just one for everything (text, images, video etc). You can enter your own html, but there's no need to. Anyone competent with Microsoft Word could pick this up without even trying, and it's good that you can upload more than one image at a time, though once they're uploaded they can be hard to move around.

Blogspot

adding images on Blogspot

I found Wordpress very similar to Blogspot for entering text but there were a lot more options. You can easily enter images into a text post but there is also the option to do a 'quick post' (simple text OR image, you have to choose). There is also the option to decide what 'format' your post appears in (standard, gallery status) which seem to overcomplicate things a bit but as they say on their homepage, "we have something unique" - some people might like things like this.

Wordpress

I encountered problems on Tumblr, when trying to get the posts to look consistent with the other blogs. Though it's really easy to use, you have to conform to their layout. 

I tried to post 3 images using the image post option, but Tumblr is designed to have only 1 image per post; so it put one big picture at the top with 2 small ones underneath when I wanted them all the same size. Confusing!

Instead, I tried to put the images in a text post. I used the same text for each blog to test the differences. For absolutely no reason, on Tumblr the quotation marks didn't show up in the title!? (Actually, on Wordpress the title for one of my images didnt appear at all). In an image post you can't have a title - only a caption.

Even though it was annoying that I couldnt make pictures in the same post the same size, I could easily upload them as separate posts. However, one advantage it has compared to Blogspot is that you can easily choose the order of the pictures, while on here they're really difficult to move around once uploaded.

When I tried to centre images it didn't work, I'm sure a simple bit of HTML tweaking could do this, but for someone looking for an easy blog this is frustrating.

See how the 3 blogs turned out in the next post.

Week 5 - Experiment 1

As my tutorial was last week, I was not scheduled in this Friday. I have been working independently on developing my project.

For my first experiment I asked some of my friends to answer a simple questionnaire about their blogs, so that I would have a better grounding for the criteria through which I will assess the success of the blogs I make later. I used Facebook to send the questions out, for convenience and to make sure people replied quickly.

As you can see, I tried to leave the questions open-ended (e.g. why did you choose it) so I could gather a wide range of opinion; I got about 12 replies which gave me a good amount of information to work with.

Here is an example of the kind of replies I received.

I chose to show Olivia as an example as her blog is the most successful in terms of the most followers, and as she has just be awarded 'Best New Fashion Blog' at the Cosmopolitan Blog Awards (well done Liv!)

Instead of posting the rest of my replies on here, I have read them and written a summary, trying to include everything people have said.

First, most notably, my friends used either Tumblr or Blogspot. Wordpress was not represented at all in my survey, except by my tutor. This is interesting to observe; apparently Wordpress caters to a different age group/ clientele. Tumblr and Blogspot were equally represented by my peers, and interestingly they preferred to follow blogs of the same type as theirs. There was one exception, a Tumblr user who favoured "proper blogs on Blogspot". The fact that users gave similar reasons for using their chosen site (easy, quick, customisable) made me wonder if they were really that different, but a pattern did emerge of Tumblr being better suited to image posts and Blogspot lending itself well to more wordy posts. One Blogspot user said "posts feel more special" but of course this is just his opinion. People seem to find both blog providers easy to use, though one Tumblr user mentioned it was only easy "once you get your head around it". Of everyone I asked, the Tumblr accounts had between 20 and 1700 followers, whereas the Blogspot blogs' followers ranged from 92 to 1105, not a huge difference. Tumblr seemed to used more for displaying work and Blogspot more for fun, but they crossed over. Though this was not the case for my friends (many of whom are illustrators)  I have observed that a lot of Tumblr users simply re-blog existing images, whereas Blogspot users are more likely to post original material.

The most interesting part of the survery revealed what people thought was missing from their blog providers. The improvements they suggested were:

• Making it easier to see how many people read your blog and more information about them (location etc)
• Separating the words and pictures onto two separate pages
• Easier access to images
• Larger images/videos
• Better comment system, so individual comments could be addressed (incorporate instant messaging?)
• Making it easier to blog from a smartphone
• Being able to add other people's posts to a list of favourites. 

Now I need to move on to my 2nd experiment: making the 3 blogs. I will refer back to what I have learnt here when I come to analysing them in terms of efficiency and success.

Week 4 - Tutorial Feedback

Today in my tutorial we discussed how ideally my next step would be to conduct some practical experiments, giving substance to my ideas.

My project itself is an experiment, but before I set up the 3 blogs and start the 'competition' between them, I need to consider the criteria through which I will evaluate their effectiveness. Some suggestions so far have been: which is the quickest/easiest to set up, which is the most aesthetically pleasing, and ultimately: which reaches the widest audience! I not only want to look into how these 3 blog environments are different, but also why. And what kind of people do they attract?

Topherchris works for Tumblr: worryingly, I think he made this image himself.

"Here we see him practically drowning in Internet culture, joyous to the end, and nationalistic to his corner of cyberspace (a particular nationalism new to our generation, and one that I share, which often supersedes any allegiances to physical surroundings)." 'Forbes' article

We discussed the idea that one could assume the blog that takes the least time to create is the best, and I feel I could analyse this link between 'speed' and 'progress further; when did we decide faster is better. Is it really better, or has technology simply lulled us into thinking this?

An interesting suggestion that came up, based on an image in my previous post, was that I need to consider the icons representing each blog more carefully. This was a good point, as each one ultimately summarises the site and its target users. For example, the Blogspot logo looks very technological and its brightly coloured. Its simplicity and boldness could attract users, but could also but them off, as the technological aspect could suggest that the blog site is dauntingly difficult to use and requires specialist knowledge (it doesn't).

My research has led me to this site, which I will look at more closely this week:

http://www.bloggingtips.com/2008/09/19/100-great-blog-logos/

It provides a visual list of the 'best blog logos', but this is only according to the author. For me it would be more useful to conduct a survey, where a larger number of prospective (or current) bloggers select their favourite logos, and explain why. I could also investigate which are the most visited blogs on the internet, and compare their logos according to these statistics. Even their names are important: surely a catchy title would make people more likely to re-visit a blog (as well as initially choosing it from a search engine search).

Screengrab of Andy Smith's blog, the first illustrator who's blog came up when I searched for 'illustrator blog' on Google. Why? I've never even heard of Andy Smith. I need to investigate this!

We talked about the differences between displaying reproductions of art on the internet and in the real ('atom') world. Does putting images on blogs take them out of context? What happens if we design images especially/exclusively to be displayed on the internet? Adapting images to suit the internet is another interesting strand of thought.

via 'the LOLvantgarde'

So, how can I contextualise an illustration blog with a real scenario? My first thought would be an art gallery but there are obviously vast differences. How could I create a real-world alternative/solution to blogging? Now that we are so reliant on it, we may need one if the internet ever disappeared!

So for my 3 experiments are:

1) Asking people who use each site, why they use it and how it suits them (or doesn't). Present these findings on this blog.

2) Making (and recording the process of making) the 3 contending blogs which I will then develop and then analyse. 

3) According to my findings, suggesting a MORE successful alternative, perhaps even in the real world rather than online. Try making a rough version and see how effective this is.