Collaborative weblog
From Siki
How Collaborative Weblogs Operate
Collaborative Blogs involve simultaneous editing of a text or media file by different participants on a network who can be miles and miles apart but share a similar interest or passion and work together on a blog.
There are several factors that drive the collaborative blog and which are making it a more desired blog for some people. One factor is that as sites change and develop followings, those readers expect a certain amount of output to keep them coming back. However most bloggers have day jobs, families and lives and thus cannot be on the Internet blogging every hour of the day. Spreading the “blogging” load allows sites to evolve into a more continuous stream of output, and thus keeps readers happier and more likely to return.
Blogging could change how we view and interpret words. There is no doubt that blogging is to be a permanent fixture on and within the media horizon of the future. Blogging is undoubtedly a phenomenon that demands attention and opinions lean towards a collaborative future. Blogs allow more than one person to view a journal, because now it’s online and readers can comment on the contents, and leave opinions and remarks. Collaborative blogs are, therefore, allowing more and more interaction between users and readers, because now it is not only a reader commenting on one person’s post but on a multiple voiced blog, that expressed more than one opinion, that can share the blog load and therefore offer more to its readers. A collaborative blog allows for more networked interaction between people all over the world, eliminating the previous difficulty of location and availability. The blog is relentlessly contemporary. There's very little back story in a weblog, it’s a relatively new concept. Blogs are a new form of writing that can reveal or create characters, real or fake. Books are a narrative genre, whereas blogs have never been viewed or used in this way. The interaction of the reader and the author in relation to the weblog may influence the way in which the author of the blog has written the posts. The possibility of anonymity also influences how a blog author writes.
Blogging and book-writing are very different activities: blogging is of that particular moment, and writing a book involves creating a relationship with a reader over hours of reading and hundreds of pages. A new annual award called the Blooker Prize will reward the best writers of literary works that started its life as online journals. As blogs and bloggers have risen to prominence, many have used their new-found fame to turn then regularly updated online journal into an old-fashioned book.
Advantages of a collaborative blog and collaborative media in general, include the fact that a range of diverse voices and opinions get heard instead of just one controlling opinion. It relies heavily on the notion of teamwork, which also means less work for everybody, because the workload is being shared around. Another advantage may be the fact that one person does not have to be entirely knowledgable in a particular field, the knowledge and different skills can be spread out and delegated so that each person can work on an area they are comfortable with and can excel in. It also means that people are not restricted to the confines of location, because people can be from all sides of the Earth and still have access to the site, and are therefore able to conntribute their time, knowledge, interests, opinions and skills.
Some disadvantages may be that people may have conflicting opinions and interests, and this may cause tension within the collaboration. As is all group work, some people may excel more in specific fields than others and still receive the same amount of credit for the finished product/blog/software etc.
Vox Pops - Collaborative Media and Collaborative Blogs
We interviewed fellow participants in their own C.R.A.M.P project, as well as Sean Healy, the famed creator of Skynoise and Lecturer in Intergrated Media @ RMIT about their thoughts on collaborative media. To hear the audio, click on their names. The transcript of the interviews are as below.
Caffa:
Collaborative blogs, to my understanding, is a blog made up of lots of people coming together and using the blog. So as I always say the more the merrier. The benefits are more content within the blog, a lot of different views and opinions on topics. Some disadvantages are that some members of the blogs may not agree with other members of the blog. Collaborative media in my experience has been quite a positive one. I think having a group working on a piece of media means everyone is more motivated to help out and do their bit, and also all the ideas can bounce off each other which usually results in a lot more developed ideas. Which always makes the project more interesting in the end.
Dewani:
There are a whole range of opinions and ideas and expertise and putting it into one resource. You would get a good spread and a good general… I suppose collaborative media is good in that you do get your average Joe is able to have a say and participate, but you don’t get the whole media ethics thing. People might just write away, willy nilly, and may not be concerned about the truth or things like that. That’s probably the obvious thing about participatory media… there’s a lot of shit to wade through, I suppose that’s what google’s for.
Harriet:
Do you think that a blog is a better environment for environmentalist as opposed to traditional media like magazines, meeting, communities, and opening up for people to involve them?
Well it might be better for ppl who are more interested in it, but for people who aren’t actively searching it out, then traditional media might be better because it’s in their face, they don’t have to go looking for it.
What's you opinion on collaborative media?
I think that collaborative media is a positive thing because, well, the old saying two heads are better than one, and it’s better to have more than one person’s opinion. But sometimes things can get dumbed down because everyone has to agree on it, so it might not be as forceful as it would otherwise be.
Luke
What do you think about collaborative media online?
Well I think it’s got its ups and downs. I mean it’s obviously great in terms of teaching people to work together which is a great skill to have. And yeah it’s a great way to bringing people together. You’ve got the assurance of letting someone else edit your own thing and you can all edit other people’s work. You’re obviously learning to work off each other and their ideas, which are obviously going to help your own work if you can learn to listen to other people, and their ideas. So group research is great in that sense.
What are the disadvantages/advantages of this?
Well the advantages are that I guess everyone gets to have a say. Instead of one person creating something, everyone gets to put in a little bit. Like a collage of a lot of people’s opinions and a lot of people’s work all together. That creates an online community, say for example we’re exploring an online street art blog, a community that lets people do and discuss street art everywhere and together in the online space, which isn’t happening out on the street itself.
Sean
It’s interesting in 2006 online media is giving people an online voice, online access to voicing and expressing themselves with media. We can find ourselves in a lot of social media, social software, and different collaborative publishing model online, and I generally think there are lots of good aspects to this. Diversity of ideas, it’s very democratic, but however there are also lots of flaws and problems with what’s happening. But on a general trend in the last decade I think it’s great that a lot more people, not just a pinnacle of people, are able to get themselves into it quite a lot. On the flipside it’s now getting harder and harder to find quality amongst everything. You have to wade through quite a lot to find what your actually after. But there are tools to help people find and stay in touch with quality media once they’ve found it.
What do you think are the advantages and disadvantages of collaborative blogs?
Well I think all blogs are collaborative in the sense that it’s open and all people are able to give comments and feed back, and there’s advantages in being able to have lots of voices to form this media. Disadvantages are maybe sometimes descent and confrontation and Internet trolls with comments and span. Also, where a group of people decide to create a blog together they don’t have to live in the same place. You can have six people from all around the world contributing at different hours of the day and different perspectives. As you grow to like a certain blog you might find you like someone’s voice quite a lot. But then someone else’s quite annoys you. Because of the diversity in collaborative blogs, you’ll always come back for more. The group blogs that are successful have diversity in voices, personalities that make it interesting. Quite like in a band where you bounce off each other’s ideas and motivation, unlike being a solo author where you’re just by yourself living under a staircase somewhere.
Terry
What do you think about collaborative blog?
I think the advantages of collaborative blogs are that because there are multiple people working on it, there’ll be lots of competition to get the right material. So quality wise it’ll need to be fresh, up to date, and crisp otherwise there’ll be someone there waiting to take your place. You can’t just ramble on about god knows what. Unfortunately thought a bit of a disadvantage of collaborative blogs is that it doesn’t have its sole personality. There’s a lot of competition to get your voice heard, which is one of the reasons why blogs are so popular in the first place- distinct authorship.
