Exegesis

For the theme of my web presence I decided to focus on my favourite hobby, origami. Origami has something I have always enjoyed doing, as a person lacking in artistic talent being able to follow steps to create something is a joy. Through my web presence I wish to capture that passion I have for making origami pieces, as well as create several platforms, through the use of my contributing nodes, to organise and display the online sites and tutorials I have looked at when making new pieces. Unlike presences formed in the real world, online web presence are created very deliberately and can focus and expand on one particular facet of a person (Mazzarella, 2005).  

For my central node I wanted to create a blog where I could write about any projects I was working, or anything interesting I had discovered in relation to my origami, such as instruction books or new types of paper. Blogs are generally organised in reverse-chronological order and can be used as diary or a way of sharing knowledge, usually they have section for readers to comment on posts and interact with the blogger as well as other readers (Kaplan, 2012). After looking at several sites such as Wordpress and Livejournal, I decided to use Blogger as I had used it in the past and felt confident that I could edit the layout and design to suit my theme. The template I used for my blog was the simple default blogger layout. However I only used it as a starting point, customizing the layout to better suit my needs. Rather than only having just a list of links to my contributing nodes on my blog I decided to use an RSS Feed to show my Delicious bookmarks, as well as having an image that linked directly to my Pinterest gallery. Having learnt about RSS feeds in Module 2 of my unit I understood how they could be used as a tool to make it easier for people to engage in my blog and view updates to my other nodes without me having to continuously change my site (Woods, 2012).

The avatar that I created to use across my nodes was based off of a design I had come up with a few years ago and used as a way of signing any drawings or things that I had made. The design made up of the letters of my name in capitals, K A T E, arranged in such a way that they created an image. For my colour theme for the nodes I decided to stick with red, black and white. These colours matched well with the clean sharp layout of my blog, as well as tying in with the red and white of the Japanese flag since my web presence revolved around origami. I used the same logo and colour scheme for my other nodes as well as logos and colours are an effective way to link different sites together and help create a cohesive web presence (Barr& Weiss, 2012). In my original layout for my blog I had the links to my contributing nodes across the top as pages. I decided to change this as it looked rather misleading, taking you to a complete different site rather than just a different page of the blog.

My goal for choosing my contributing nodes was to find sites that would support my blog rather than just act as an extension of it. With my blog I decided to use Youtube as one of my contributing nodes due to its popularity and use as a platform for origami tutorial videos. Using Youtube I was able to create a channel to feature a playlist of my favourite origami tutorials by other Youtubers, as well as create a platform to which I could distribute my own origami tutorials if I decided to make them.

As I wanted to use my central node as more text based platform, I decide to use Pinterest as a way of displaying some of my origami work. Pinterest is a photo-sharing site that allows uses to upload, share, and manage images. Users are able to create pinboards to create to help categorize their collection of images (Spencer, 2011). Photo-sharing has become a popular way for people to share their photo content and photographic creations to much larger target audiences then was originally possible before the introduction of Web 2.0 (Brown, 2007).

For my third node I decided to use Delicious, a social bookmarking site. The site acts as a sort of folksonomy, with people tagging their bookmarks as way to categorize and sort them (Peters & Becker, 2009). Users are then able to see a combined view of everyone's bookmarks with a certain tag. For my Delicious account I am focusing on bookmarking origami sites which I use or find interesting to support my web presence.

Finally I made sure that all my contributing nodes where linked to my central node, unifying my web presence across the different platforms. By using tools produced through creation of Web 2.0 I was able to create an online identity focused on specially one of my favourite hobbies.

References

Barr, C., & Weiss, A. (2012). Million dollar web presence leverage the web to build your brand and transform your business. New York: Entrepreneur Press.

Brown, F. (2007). Metadata Goes Mainstream. KnowGenesis International Journal for Technical Communication, 2(1), 10.

Kaplan, A. (2012). Blogs: finding your voice, finding your audience. New York, NY: Rosen Central.

Mazzarella, S. R. (2005). Girl wide web: girls, the Internet, and the negotiation of identity. New York: Peter Lang.

Peters, I., & Becker, P. (2009). Folksonomies indexing and retrieval in Web 2.0. Berlin: De Gruyter/Saur.

Spencer, M. (2011, September 11). Pinning: These are a few of my favorite things. San Antonio Express-News. Retrieved November 18, 2013, from http://www.mysanantonio.com/life/article/Pinning-These-are-a-few-of-my-favorite-things-1882964.php

Woods, S. (2012). Introduction to Module 2: What is Web 2.0. [Course notes]. Retrieved from http://lms.curtin.edu.au