Summary of my blogging experience

The purpose of this post is to reflect on the ups and downs I experienced during my blogging course and how the course affected me.

The course was running for 9 weeks and unfortunately due to a severe virus and an ear operation I was not able to attend the first weeks. Hence, I could not participate in the group projects. This is why I focussed all my energy on doing well with my personal blog.

In the beginning I saw this as quite a challenge since there was a lot for me to catch up on and I had no background knowledge about "blogging" what so ever.
Yes, being in the media industry, I had read a few blogs and I was aware of the impact they could have, but did I ever consider creating my own blog? No......

The concept of posting my thoughts online was quite intimidating to me and it took me a while to familiarise myself with Nigel's course outline and weekly tasks.
In the beginning most of my posts were giving general information on new websites such as l'exposure.net, etc. Once I got more used to the process of blogging and once I felt comfortable with the technological aspects of blogging (adding pictures and videos as well as creating links and formating) my blog posts started to become more related to Nigel's weekly tasks and articles.

Being asked to give an example for a good and a bad website I really went through a personal exploratory process of analysing which websites I like and which ones I don't and why I am feeling that way whilst before that I took most websites as a given and never really paid any attention to web design or structure.

The process of looking at and comparing various social networking sites was educating me about the variety of features of social networking sites. I was very impressed when reading about the practicality of Twitter and decided to register and use it in the future. This really changed my mind about social networks since I used to consider most of them as fairly distracting. I also still have a quite sceptic approach when it comes to how people present themselves online since often this online identity has nothing to do with the actual person at all and I am a great believer that a lot of people escape into the virtual world if they feel overwhelmed with the real life challenges.

The articles Nigel gave us to read and my personal research really got me drawn to the "blogging" experience and I felt more and more comfortable to post my thoughts online. Apart from merely addressing Nigel's tasks I tried to add value to my blog by posting videos or thoughts which inspired me personally. One website which I simply love is www.ted.com and you will find a few videos from that website in my blog.
When thinking how the course and the course topics added value to me, I would argue that I am now far more experienced and confident in the fields of social networking and blogging, but also far more aware of the negative aspects and dangers of new media technologies, such as online repression, identity theft and credit card frauds.

Going forward, after having gone through the entire research proces, I will be able to distinguish between useful and useless social networking applications and the useful ones will hopefully add value to my existing communication and help me to enjoy digitalisation to its fullest.