Reading Journal Two

This week I have thought extensively about what contributes to a consistent, thematic, professional and most importantly, entertaining blog. Blogging, as it is new medium of the journalism world is very malleable in its form, and can be approached through fresh new angles. One of the things that struck me about Robert Mackey’s lecture on blogging, was A. how immediate the medium was, and B. how passionate he was about making his blog consistently news-worthy. Through my weekly readings and observations of the following blogs, I have found that there are many ways to interpret what makes a blog thematic and consistent.

In one of my previous responses, I mentioned that the blog Futility Closet is slightly reminiscent of the facts on Snapple caps. These informative yet fun blogs are enjoyable because they are a subsection of blogging that is unique to the medium of blogging itself. Such journalism would be hard to come by in a newspaper or even a magazine, because the length can be quite short, and the information is not fully correlative to the other posts. This week, Futility Closet updated with a variety of entries, one that particularly struck me was a series of poems under the title of “Better Homes.” These poems were chosen because they all interpret the idea of a home with great acuity, while still maintaining lightness. While it was not a favorite post of mine, it exemplified how the blog is not solely dedicated to updating with facts, definitions and quotes, providing this moderately researched post, which had great curatorial effort. Such an organization was indicative of the blogs overall consistency.

Another comparable blog I paid close attention to this week, was Boing Boing. Although Boing Boing falls under a similar sub-genre to that of Futility Closet, there are still inherent differences. The posts are more “news-worthy” meaning that they update with timely events, and even have interpretations of ledes before getting into the content of the post. The posts, like most blogs, have a variety of mediums within them, the majority being images and videos. The posts vary in length, some ranging from three sentences others are as long as four hundred words. What is interesting about this blog, is that the updates are very frequent, some being a mere ten minutes a part, further typifying how the immediacy in blogging is applicable to any type of blog, not just ones that are attributed to “hard news.” Additionally, Boing Boing uses the secondary source artfully, and respectfully, such evidence can be seen on their post on “Urban Foraging.” The majority of the post is from an article in National Geographic, but the bloggers take it upon themselves to link other posts concerning the same topic. In this case, there are three additional posts on Urban Foraging, which as we know is not the most widely researched topic. To compare, another post on Boing Boing titled “Nude Feud: Fundamentalist Nudists Terrorize Naked Swingers in France” is not only provocative and humorous, but quotes two different sections from the secondary source, from the UK Independent. Since the bloggers pull what they feel to be the important aspects of the article (which in this case provides two perspectives in the same article) they are truly conveying this idea of blogging being the artful organization of all of the news on the web. Thus, blogs such as Boing Boing are a very valuable way of absorbing information on specific topics. Through further researching these blogs, I can now understand that blogging ,like anything is not solely dependant on the topic, but on its continuity, organization, accessibility, and entertainment value.