Reflection

Dear my fellow readers,

It has come to an end of my journey on Issues in Publication and Design. It has been an indescribable journey full of valuable information through lot of theories and this journey will be an everlasting experience for me by being able to practically apply the knowledge in the field of publishing and design. 

Throughout the whole course I have learned  that every document has its purpose and should meet the readers habit and context of use, (Penman 1998, p.10-11) and there are lot of important factors to consider when designing a document like readers culture, (how visual and verbal signs work in particular cultures), (Schriver p.372). This course opened my eyes to new media designs, specifically how multimodality brings different affordances to different genres, (Walsh 2006).

I have understood the importance of planning,  building credibility (providing credible links, in-text citations) and desirability (like writing short paragraph and use of photos to help illustrate blog posts) to build a good blog, (Berg 2008). 

This Journey is valuable for me in many ways, not only being able to gain knowledge but being able to get engaged and  gain lot of experience from the subject with a very incredible lecturer Miss Jenny. Perhaps this learning would have not been such a great experience without a very helpful and welcoming lecturer like Miss Jenny.

References:

• Berg, KK 2008, ‘Blog Usability – How to reach Your Blogging Happy Place’, viewed 11 November 2010, < http://www.usabilityeffect.com/article_blogusability.html>

• Penman, R 1998, ‘ Document structures and readers’ habits’, Communication news, vol. 11, no. 2, pp. 10-11.

• Schriver, KA 1997, ‘The interplay of words and pictures’, Dynamics in document design: creating texts for readers, Wiley Computer Pub., New York, Chapter 6, pp. 361-441.

• Walsh, M 2006, “The ‘Textual shift’ : Examining the reading process with print, visual and multimodal texts,” Australian Journal of Language and Literacy, vol.29, no.1, p.24-37.

Online Social Networks & Privacy breach

“Privacy concerns swirled around Facebook again after an employee of a firm called Skull Security compiled and released personal data on more than 100 million Facebook users”, (Figueroa 2010). Skull Security said it was pointing out vulnerabilities in Facebook privacy controls. 

In response to this Facebook says, “ these information are similar to the white pages of the phone book, this is the information available to enable people to find each other, which is the reason people join Facebook’,’ (Figueroa, 2010),  but are the users of Facebook subscribed to use their personal information by third party organizations?

‘Facebook, MySpace and several other social-networking sites have been sending data to advertising companies: despite promises they don't share such information without consent’, (Steel & Vascellaro, 2010).

Despite of security issues: users of facebook is on the rise. 'Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced: number of people accessing Facebook through mobiles – tripled from 65 million to 200 million',(Source: The Sydney Morning Herald, 2010).

“Facebook has changed its privacy settings twice since last summer. Both times, some of users’ privacy settings have defaulted back to the public options, so users unaware of the changes won’t switch their privacy setting back, or that they won’t be aware of how to do so in the first place”, (Figueroa, 2010).

To manage your privacy on Facebook, you will need to navigate through 50 settings with more than 170 options, (The New York Time, 2010).

Many of the core obligations contained in the Information Privacy Principles do not apply where the information is “publicly available information”, (Gunasekara and Toy 2008, p.202). So as users of social networks we have an obligation for ourselves to protect the information from public.

A study done by Krishnamurthy and Wills (2009, p.12 ), with popular Online Social Networks (OSNs) show that:  

1. Personal Identifiable Information (PII) is constantly leak to one or more third parties via Request-URLs, Refer headers and cookies. 
2.   Two of the OSNs directly leak pieces of PII to third parties with one of the OSNs leaking zip code and email information about users that may not be even publicly available within the OSN itself. 
3.   Leakage extends to external OSN applications, which not only have access to user profile information, but leak a user’s OSN identifier to other third parties.

“Some applications raise discrete privacy issues of their own. For example, the Social Network Integrated Friend Finder (Sniff) is an application, accessed via Facebook or mobile phone that provides users with a detailed map of their friend’s locations”, (Gunasekara & Toy 2008, p.193). These are extreme privacy issues which can bring lot of problems to users and their personal security as the connection between cyberspace and real world becomes very real.

(Image source:http://stuff.tv) .The US Company behind the technology says the service users can choose whether to be visible or invisible. It will cost mobile users 50p per sniff and has already gone down a storm in Sweden, where 80,000 people have signed up, (Independent Television News Limited 2008).

  References:

• Figueroa, A 2010, ‘Privacy issues hit Facebook again’, The Christian Science Monitor, viewed 4 November 2010, < http://www.csmonitor.com/Business/new-economy/2010/0730/Privacy-issues-hit-Facebook-again>

• Gunasekara, G & Toy, A 2008, ‘ “MySpace” or public space: the relevance of data protection laws to online social networking’, New Zealand universities law review, vol. 23, no. 2, pp. 191-214.

• Krishnamurthy, B & Wills, CE 2009, ‘On the Leakage of Personally Identifiable Information Via Online Social Networks’, viewed 4 November 2010, <www2.research.att.com/~bala/papers/wosn09.pdf>

• Steel, E & Vascellaro, JE 2010, ‘Facebook, MySpace Confront Privacy Loophole’, The Wall Street Journal, viewed 4 Novemeber 2010, < http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704513104575256701215465596.html>

E-books popularity on the rise

E-books started when paper books were initially converted to digital format, which then is able to view on computer interface. But until now e-book has been met with fierce resistance by publishers and book lovers, (Cornwall, 2010). 

Image source: guardian.co.uk. Amazon Kindle e-reader: ‘Demand for the virtual book has gone vertical in the past year, fuelled by the recent global release of Amazon's Kindle Book and worldwide launch of the much hyped Apple iPad’,(Cornwall, 2010).

'E-books are gaining wider interest since the introduction of portable electronic reading devices and software-based readers that provide users with more realistic book reading experiences',  (Shiratuddin et al. 2003).

The enTourage eDGe e-book is displayed at the 2010 International Consumer Electronics Show at the Las Vegas Convention Center January 7, 2010, (Source: Epoch Times, 2010).

As e-books are evolving and bringing new genres to the new media ecosystem: who are their new potential users?

According to Reuters (2010), 'The amounts of time children spend reading books for enjoyment decreases as they use cell phones and other mobile technology, but e-books might just bring them back to literature'. According to this report : '57 percent kids said they would be interested in reading an e-book'.
'E-books have potential in enhancing distance education: in particular, e-books are able to enhance the interaction between educators and students when dealing with teaching and learning materials', (Shiratuddin et all. (2003).  The students who participated in this E-book study agree that:

• The possibility of imitating actions used on printed notes, such as highlighting, bookmarking and annotating, is very useful and helpful. 
• Students could store their collections of assignments (in the e-book form) in the personalized digital library provided in the reader: thus improving the electronic authoring experience and promoting self-publishing.

Despite of all these important advantages they define there are still negative comments from users,‘Australian publisher Louise Adler says one of the biggest disappointments so far has been the very limited catalog of books on offer, most of them aimed squarely at an American audience’,(Cornwall, 2010).

(Image source: iPhoneAppleFreelancer): Reading from computer screens is tiring for the eyes and about 25 percent slower than reading from paper. The iPad measured at 6.2% lower reading speed than the printed book, whereas the Kindle measured at 10.7% slower than print, (Nielsen, 2010).

However, “Today libraries and publishers are finally coming to terms with the fact that a tipping point on e-books might be reached faster than either party ever imagined”, (Shelburne 2009, p.59). So in my opinion as the use of E-book is on the rise, it is very important for academia’s to concentrate on E-books to reap the future benefits of book handling and sharing.  “The University of Illinois Library currently provides access to approximately 292,000 e-books in a variety of subject areas from a mixture of publishers and providers, (Shelburne 2009, p. 60).

References:

• Cornwall, D 2010, ‘E-books popularity on the rise’, The 7.30 Report, viewed 3 November 2010, <http://www.abc.net.au/7.30/content/2010/s2849989.htm>

• Nielsen, J 2010, ‘iPad and Kindle Reading Speeds’, viewed 7 November 2010, <http://www.useit.com/alertbox/ipad-kindle-reading.html>

• Reuters, 2010, ‘E-books may spur more kids to read: study’, viewed 11 November 2010,  <http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE68S4CU20100930>

• Shelburne, WA 2009, ‘ E-book usage in an academic library: User attitudes and behaviors’, Library collections, acquisitions & Technical services, vol. 33, no. 2-3, pp. 59-72.

• Shiratuddin, N, Landoni, M, Gibb, F & Hassan, S 2003, ‘ E-Book Technology and Its Potential Applications in Distance Education’, Journal of Digital Information, vol.3, no.4, viewed 3 November 2010, < https://journals.tdl.org/jodi/article/viewArticle/90/89>

Google Books & Copyright issues

Google’s ambitious book digitalization plan sounds very amusing to many users: especially as students it would be exciting if we could reach to every book that has been published through online. 

‘Five years ago Google began scanning millions of print book titles and making them accessible online through Google search. The only problem was copyright: so many authors and publishers sued Google, (ABC Radio, 2009). In an out-of-court settlement, it was agreed that Google pay authors and publishers $60 for each book digitized, as well as 63 per cent of all revenue it earns from the sale of online books. In return, Google will be protected against copyright infringement, (ABC Radio 2009). For works under copyright protection, the user will see the bibliographic information as well as a few text "snippets" around the search term, unless the publisher has given Google permission to display more text, (Hanratty, 2005).

Google has implemented an "opt-out" approach, in which copyright holders must notify Google if they do not want their work included in Google's searchable library database, (Proskine 2006, p.219). “Google believes such an approach to copyright should apply in the Google Library Project because trudging through millions of works and requesting permission title-by-title would be unwieldy and would generate prohibitive transaction costs.” (Proskine 2006, p.219).

Source: www.wired.com : Google settlement with authors and publishers:  goes some way toward drawing a road map for a possible digital future for publishers and authors, who worried that they were losing control over how their works were used online, as the music industry has: approximately seven million books that Google has already scanned, four million to five million are out of print,(Helft & Rich 2008).  

As print books are difficult to locate, transport, difficult to share and expensive: Google’s project provide the easy access to previously unreachable books. ‘A new study on students and technology by the Educause Center for Applied Research found that 94.6 percent of students use the library’s website at least once a week, Project Information Literacy found that nine out of 10 college students surveyed turned to libraries “for online scholarly research databases, (American Library Association 2010, p.ii).

In my opinion Google’s Book digitalization project not only benefits the consumers but also provides greater benefits for authors and publisher to be recognized around the world. “The Google Library Project advances the public interest by making information globally accessible regardless of a user's income, geographic location, and proximity to a library. In this way, it facilitates progress in science and the arts. The Project also simultaneously drives publishers' incentives to create by increasing their profits based on increased exposure to book titles. Thus, the Google Library Project is consistent with copyright law and deserves legislative consideration.” (Proskine 2006, p.239).

References:

• ABC Radio, 10 July 2009, ‘Publishers and Google book deal’,  The Book Show, viewed 5 November 2010, < http://www.abc.net.au/rn/bookshow/stories/2009/2622177.htm>

• American Library Association (ALA), April 2010, ‘ The State of America’s Libraries-2010’, viewed 5 November 2010, <http://www.ala.org/ala/newspresscenter/mediapresscenter/americaslibraries/index.cfm>

• Hanratty, E 2005, ‘GOOGLE LIBRARY: BEYOND FAIR USE?’, Duke Law & Technology Review, viewed 5 November 2010, < http://www.law.duke.edu/journals/dltr/articles/2005dltr0010.html>

• Helft, M & Rich, M 2008, ‘ Google Settles Suit Over Book-Scanning’, The New York Times, viewed 5 November 2010, <http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/29/technology/internet/29google.html?scp=1&sq=e%20settlement.%20%E2%80%9COn%20the%20one%20hand,%20one%20admires%20all%20of%20Google%E2%80%99s%20inventions,%E2%80%9D%20Rick%20Prelinger,%20board%20president&st=cse>

• Proskine, EA 2006, ‘ Google’s Technicolor Dreamcoat: A Copyright Analysis of the Google Book Search Library Project’, Berkeley technology law journal, vol. 21, no. 1, pp. 213-239.

Photojournalism & Credibility

There are hundreds of reasons why we cannot trust mass-media photography, images can lie , there are many new image-manipulation software  available cheap in every market and in this Cyber-era famous photos are faked in one way or another and our traditionally trusted news media’s are also using it.

Time Newsfeed falls for a fake New York City Tornado photo that supposedly showed the tornado crossing the water near the Statue of Liberty, which began circulation on Twitter, (Stableford, 2010)

 

Source: www.thewrap.com

According to Stableford (2010): “Time posted the photo-nabbed from a Twitter user: on Times newsfeed blog under the heading, "Gotham Tornado: Amazing Photo of Twister Passing Statue of Liberty." The image was a real, once-in-a-lifetime photo: but the problem is it was taken in 1976: apparently lifted from the NOAA website.
Time eventually corrected the post: “Correction: This post previously featured a photo  from 1976. Original story follows: This photo comes courtesy of Dave Carlson's Twitter feed - not sure if he took the photo, or merely found it online”, (Snyder, 2010).

 These incidences raise the question of credibility of photojournalism even with deep resources like Time can be duped by the Twitterati.

There are many examples that we can take from the past: which questions the credibility of the photojournalism : “Reuters withdraws photograph of Beirut after Air Force attack after US blogs, photographers point out 'blatant evidence of manipulation” , (Lappin, 2006).

 

Source: You Tube: Reuters Manipulated photographs.

“The emerging realization is that photojournalism derives its meaning, its value to society, not from chemistry but from credibility. Readers do not believe the photos themselves; they believe the people who make the photos and present them as honest depictions of what happened in the community”, ( Wheeler 2002, p. xiv).

According to ABC news (2008): one of the Indonesia’s top news Weekly ‘Tempo’ has apologized for the 4-10 February 2008 edition, featured a drawing similar to the Last Supper scene which shows former president Suharto taking Jesus Christ's central place and his apostles replaced by his three daughters and three sons.

 

Source: www.daylife.com

Because of the image about a dozen representatives of several Christian groups as well as inter-religious organizations converged on the Tempo office to complain over the cover, Koran Tempo reported, (ABC news, 2008). “Document designers must visualize familiar objects and symbols that make direct contact with the specific local culture, requiring detailed study of the culture prior to designing the visuals”,(Schriver 1997, p.374).

If document designers don’t consider issues like these it will weaken the faith of audiences: will lead them to undermine the visual journalism credibility. 

References:

•  ABC News, 2008, ‘Indonesian weekly apologizes over Last Supper Suharto cover’, viewed 4 November 2010, < http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2008/02/06/2156269.htm>

• Lappin,Y 2006, ‘ Reuters admits altering Beirut photo’, Ynetnews, viewed 4 Novemebr 2010, < http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3286966,00.html>

• Schriver, KA 1997, ‘The interplay of words and pictures’, Dynamics in document design: creating texts for readers, Wiley Computer Pub., New York, Chapter 6, pp. 361-441.

• Snyder, SJ 2010, ‘Gotham Tornado: Amazing Photo of Twister Passing Statue of Liberty’, Time NewsFeed, viewed 4 November 2010, < http://newsfeed.time.com/2010/09/16/gotham-tornado-amazing-photo-of-twister-passing-statue-of-liberty/>

• Stableford, D 17 September 2010, ‘Times Falls for Fake Tornado Photo’, TheWrap, viewed 4 November 2010, < http://www.thewrap.com/media/column-post/time-falls-fake-nyc-tornado-photo-20941>

• Wheeler, TH 2002, Phototruth or Photofiction: Ethics and Media Imagery in the Digital Age, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc. , Mahwah, New Jersey. 

New forms of media publishing

According to Naughton (2006, p.10) the new media ecosystem will be richer, more diverse and more complex because of the number of content producers, the density of the interaction between each other and the speed at which each other can communicate.

Some New Forms of Media Publications are:

• Blogs
• YouTube
• Online Magazines
• Online Newspapers
• Online Books

So how is new forms of media publishing different from old forms of media?

The combine affordances (‘showing’, ‘telling’ and ‘hearing’) the digital modes offer in this multimodal environment has created a dynamic interaction between the users and the site (Walsh,2006, p.34). Perhaps the most significant difference is the emergence of the user generated contents. This new forms of media allow readers to be as creative as they can be. They can be the producer of and at the same time the publisher (Snurb, 2008, p.1-2). 

As U.S Secretary of states Hillary Clinton emphasized on her speech about internet freedom, the spread of information networks is forming a new nervous system for our planet, when something happens anywhere the rest of us learn it in real time and responds to in real time.

U.S Secretary of states Hillary speak on internet freedom.

Source:- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ccGzOJHE1rw

These new forms of media’s are allowing citizens to be active journalists, thus providing opportunities to be active participants in providing news and information. According to Reuters Traditional Italian winemakers are now using social media to publish their products. “Crociani, who says she was the first Italian winemaker to start a blog in 2004, said she has gained many new clients -individual wine lovers, restaurant owners and professional buyers -after launching a Facebook page.” (Reuters, 2010)

Twitter has upgraded its service to its users, The company announced deals with 16 partners to let users embed their multimedia content within the site, can showcase material from Google Inc.’s YouTube and Yahoo! Inc.’s Flickr, along with smaller services like Justin.TV” (MacMillan , 2010).

Surely the new media freedom of journalism has become a voice for some unheard voices among our societies while it also disturbs some counterparts in a society. Here is an interesting heading from Bloomberg, “Cyberactivists Get Help From YouTube, U.S. to Thwart Repression”. Ashraf is co-founder of AccessNow which was created because of the Iran’s post-election restrictions on YouTube, Twitter and Facebook  gets help from different sources to broadcast.

Source:  http://www.accessnow.org/

The Internet has built-in perils for democracy advocates. Lakshmanan     ( 2010)  cited according to Global Voices Online, an international bloggers network, has documented 206 cases of bloggers under arrest or threat, most in China, Egypt and Iran. In 2003 Iran became the first nation to imprison a blogger for blogging. (Tecnorati, 2009).

According to (Chau.et.all, 2009, p. 40), they have identified and analyzed a selected set of 28 racist hate groups (820 bloggers) on Xanga, one of the most popular blog-hosting sites.

References:

• Lakshmanan A.R. I, 22 February 2010, cyberactivists get help from YouTube, U.S. to Thwart Repression , viewed, 27 September 2010.  http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&sid=aecEMHij8RfM

• Chau. M , Lam. P , Shiu. B , Xu. J, Cao. J , January/February 2009, A blog Mining Framework, IEEE Computer Society.

• McMillan, D 15 Sepetember 2010, Twitter Redesigns Site, Makes It Easier to Post Videos, Photos, viewed 27 September 2010, < http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-09-15/twitter-redesigns-site-making-it-easier-to-share-videos-photos-and-maps.html >

• Naughton.J 2006, ‘Blogging and the emerging media ecosystem’, viewed on 25 September 2010, <http://reuteursinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/about/discussion/blogging.html >.

• Sussman.M, 2009, State of blogosphere 2009 introduction, viewed on 27 September 2010,< http://technorati.com/blogging/article/day-5-twitter-global-impact-and/page-2/

• Snurb, 20 April 2008, Produsage: An Introduction, http://produsage.org/

• Walsh, M 2006, The ‘textual shift’: Examining the reading process with print, visual and multimodal texts’, Australian Journal of Language and Literacy, vol. 29, no. 1, pp. 24 – 37.

Blogging Community

According to Wei Blogs are often situated within a blog community of similar interest. These communities are useful, it allows easy access to specific information of interest out of millions blog that are available. Each of these blogging communities has its own practices and behavior, some with explicit guidelines.

Similarly, Bock (cited by White, 2005), communities can be characterized by common interest, frequent interaction and identification, all three things must be present for an online space to be a community. A successful blog is one which involves community building, among peers or professionals or a community among readers. According to Donath (1997), ‘people are not only looking for information, they are also looking for affiliation, support and affirmation’. Blogs have facilitated these requirements by tagging, linking and being able to comment on each other’s blogs and with number of other features.

Example of a blog community, MarmaBLOG community focus on working women, topics in the blog includes from business, baby picture posting to wedding planning and many more.

Source: http://marmaladya.21publish.com/

"Bloggers can easily link to other blogs using, comments, hyperlinks, blogrolls, or Track-Backs-these technologies let them interact with their readers and form virtual communities in the blogosphere",(Chau.et.all, 2009, p. 37). Here are some tips from Kinkeldei (2007, p.10-11) on how to grow and work a blog community:

• Be clear in direction and topic

• Integrate existing blogs and invite users.

• Activate community features like blog directory and user directory on the community portal.

• Keep members of the community involved and informed.

• Link entries, which are tagged on Technorati, i.e. education, fashion, etc., to your blog community through an RSS feed from Technorati.

 Types of Blogging Communities

White (2006), lists three types of blogging communities, Blog Centric Community, Topic centric community and Boundaried community.

Types of blog base communities

Source:- http://kt.flexiblelearning.net.au/tkt2006/edition-11-editorial/blogs-and-community-%E2%80%93-launching-a-new-paradigm-for-online-community.

Single Blog/Blogger Centric Community

This is where readers go and comment on early bloggers, getting to know not only blogger but other commentors and their views as well. These centralized blog that is firmly controlled by the blog’s owner in terms of content.

An Example of a Blogger centric community.
Source: http://www.interplast.org/

Central Connecting Topic Community

Topic centric community is built on network formation as several blogs are linked together under a common interest.

Example of a Topic centric blogging community. Source:- http://www.lonelyplanet.com/

Boundaried Communities

Boundaried community is a collection of blogs and blog readers are invited to host on a single site. 

Example of a boundaried Community, where Clear boundaries as defined by registration and log–in. (White, 2006). Source: http://edublogs.org/

References:

• Wei.C, Formation of norms in a blogging community, viewed 26 September 2010, http://blog.lib.umn.edu/blogosphere/formation_of_norms.html

• White, N 2005, How some folks have tried to describe community, Updated April 2005 viewed 26 September 2010, http://www.fullcirc.com/community/definingcommunity.htm

• White, N 2006, Blogs and Community – launching a new paradigm for online community?, viewed 25 September 2009, http://kt.flexiblelearning.net.au/tkt2006/edition-11-editorial/blogs-and-community-%E2%80%93-launching-a-new-paradigm-for-online-community.

• Kinkeldei,B, 6 February 2007,Whitepaper Blog Communities: Forging Connections and Promoting growth Through Blog Communities, 21publish,coorperative publishing.www.21publish.com/pub/21publish/blogging-whitepaper.pdf

• Donath, JS 1997, Inhabiting the virtual city: the design of social environments for electronic communities, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA.

•   Chau. M , Lam. P , Shiu. B , Xu. J, Cao. J , January/February 2009, A blog Mining Framework, IEEE Computer Society.

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