Week 7

Hi! Well, six weeks has passed, and at last it’s reading week! This therefore means that I have no lecture this week! All week I have lazed about thinking about blogs. Contemplating if a blog is a persona, or if it is an extension of you?

This question is quite tricky to define isn’t it? Personally when I write a blog, I suppose on some level or another my blogs do resemble my thoughts on a certain subject or discussion, but then again I wouldn’t go as far as to say that the blogs I write reflect me as a person or my personality. How about you?

I read on this website-
http://bloggingexperiment.com/archives/finding-your-blogs-persona.php

That when you first start blogging, you need to find your voice, which is referring to the personality you want to portray through the way you write. This will enable you to find the voice for your blog.
‘You may have noticed I said the voice of your blog, not your voice. When you first begin blogging most of the information out there makes it seem like you have this inner voice that once you discover it will begin spewing forth great blog posts. Once you’ve been at it a while, you begin to realize that’s not quite how it works. However, as I said earlier, finding your blogging persona will often make it much easier to establish your writing style, and even that elusive “voice”.’
This persona is a bit like a role in a play. You are playing a certain character, and with that character there are certain qualities, characteristics and attributes. ‘Your blog needs to establish a role for itself in the eyes of the audience’, and then fill that role. ‘Many times this role will help your audience relate to you and may explain why they should listen to what you have to say’. Do you agree with this? I certainly agree that every blogger needs to find their voice whether it is their own, or a character. I must admit, I’m not quite convinced with the last bit about the role helping your audience relate to you, because if you’re acting out a role, how can the audience identify with you? It’s impossible; they might connect with this “character” persona of yours, but not the author of that blog.

This week I had time to arrange my trips to New York over the New Year’s and Paris, late January. I remembered about a website that we had mentioned in the lecture to help arrange your trips away, and thought I’d give it a go. I’m sure many of you have heard of it, if not used it - ‘Trip Advisor’- http://www.tripadvisor.com/. It was very helpful, and very easy to understand as it was categorized in to different sections-
• Flights
• Restaurants
• Things to do
• Cruises
• Vacation rentals
• Forums
• Find hotels travelers trust

As I clicked on the heading ‘Restaurants’, a box came up on the screen asking me to fill in the City which is your destination, and all types of different choices of recommended restaurants appeared from number 1 (the most recommended) down. I found this service highly accessible, efficient, quick to use and effective. Each restaurant had a rating, price range, who it was recommended for, what type of cuisine it was, and finally, but the most important, travelers reviews. This ensures that the public gets a true depiction of the restaurant through other people’s eyes, and not just the restaurant itself. I hope my trip goes as successful as the research on Trip Advisor!
Here’s a graph estimating how many users the website had from July ’09 until November ’09-
http://www.quantcast.com/tripadvisor.com
Well, it will be back to normal next week, so I better make the most of my time off and go and do some work… Talk to you next week! Bye.