Exegesis

Exegesis

I chose to create my web presence on the lines of a cooking blog featuring a style of cooking very dear to me - Austrian home-style cooking and cuisine.  Before starting out, I searched the web to see what was already out there in the way of Austrian cooking blogs and found there were actually few sites written in English.  I felt that this was a positive for me and that I could make a significant contribution to this area.  Nardi et al., (2004, p 224) discuss the purposes of blogs and in particular suggest that  "Blogs are a manifestation of diverse social motives, in which the inscriptions in the blog communicate specific social purposes to others."  My personal social motives therefore are to share my experiences with Austrian cooking, and encourage others to share my journey and contribute their thoughts and experiences as well.

I decided that I would use a blog format, which I would try to update with new content on a regular weekly basis, with new recipes, which I would then try out in my own kitchen.  Bar-llan (2004, p 29) describes blogs and suggests that blogs lend themselves well to this "one-man show" because blogs such as this provide "useful information with a personal touch".  Advantages of blogs include that older entries will be archived so they are always available, and newer entries are automatically at the top of the home page.  The other advantage of a blog is that other people can write comments about the recipes and ask questions.  Also Blogs are easily accessible, easy to use and navigate and the need to know HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language) is not necessary. (Blood, 2004) (Ringmar, 2007).  I decided to use Blogger as this platform lent itself well to my purposes.  In 2000, Blogger introduced  permalinks, which gave each blog entry a permanent location (a distinct URL) at which it could be referenced (Blood, 2004).  This would be very useful as separate links could be sent to Twitter and Facebook of single pages in my blog for specific recipes.

I also have a Followers gadget, and an RSS (Really Simple Sindication) feed and subscription gadget.  Further to this, I added a node linking to Delicious, where followers will find sites I have found with more recipes and information about Austrian cuisine.  I also have Twitter and Facebook links, updating when new recipes appear on my blog. 

According to boyd, d. m., & Ellison, N. B. (2007) social network sites are web-based services that facilitate users in creating a public or semi-public profile within a their network system. They display a list of other users sharing some kind of connection, and allow users to view and negotiate their list links and those made by others within the network. These connections can vary in their types and titles.  The various network sites allow users to meet others with like interests, and they also make it possible for all their networked contacts to see each others contacts. This makes it possible for connections to be made that would not otherwise be made, but mostly it creates a platform for sharing and communicating (boyd, d. m., & Ellison, N. B. 2007.)  Social network sites also vary greatly in their features and types of users. They can also facilitate professional networking, and make this a feature of their structure. An example of this would be LinkedIn. Others target specific interest groups, cultural or language groups. Some provide photo-sharing or video-sharing capabilities and others have built-in blogging and instant messaging technology. (boyd, d. m., & Ellison, N. B. 2007.)  Therefore the links to Facebook and Twitter on my blog will facilitate this social networking and sharing, targeting individuals and groups which share my interest. To link my blog to Twitter I had to set up a new Twitter account and also a new email account so that everything was fresh and not connected to my old email and Twitter accounts.  Once my new Twitter account was set up I added a profile and profile picture.  Then I started following some relevant Twitter accounts, which were on cooking topics, which I thought would be beneficial. This then led to linking to Facebook.

My next job was to add a Delicious node.  To do this I went to Delicious, organised my bookmarks into Tag Bundles so that followers could find my links easily, then I went to the Settings page and found the Network Badges link, and copied the HTML code into a new Gadget on my Blog. Delicious defines itself as a “Social Bookmarking service” allowing users to save all their bookmarks online, also allowing users to share their bookmarks with other people, and to see what other people are bookmarking.  Also the use of tagging tools enable the easy searching of topics and the creation of topic sets.   

Web 2.0 platforms, such as Flickr and You Tube, have made it possible for people everywhere to share their content with a world wide audience. With all the content out there, to find what you want can be a daunting task. Thankfully there are ways to sort through the huge volumes of multi-media content. One of the ways this is done is through tagging. Kennedy et al (2007) explain how knowledge can be generated through "representative tags" and "metadata patterns".  So I decided to photograph my cooking experiments and upload these to my Flickr account and tag them.  The idea being that followers who also wish to try out the recipes could look at these photos to clarify any instructions they were not clear about. Each entry will be accompanied with a slideshow link to facilitate this.  I also added a Flickr Flash Badge, and as I add photos of my cooking experiments and tag them, those images will be available on the blog page.

Sending blog viewers to my contributing nodes also means that they need to then be able to get back to my blog.  This proved to be somewhat difficult.  I managed to accomplish this on Delicious by making sure my blog address was in my profile, this done, it was now visible when clicking on the Delicious badge on my blog.  I then did the same on Twitter.  This process, however, proved to be quite difficult on Flickr and Facebook.  After much fruitless effort, I managed to add the URL of my blog into the comment section under the photo set and then also added it to the profile page.  The only way I could do this with Facebook, was to add a Like button with a Facebook badge.

I also wanted to add another node which was an online cooking and recipe web 2.0 tool.  I googled web 2.0 tools and came up with Go2web20 (http://www.go2web20.net/) which lists a multitude of web 2.0 tools with a multitude of uses.  After browsing through the lists and trying out a few which looked promising, I settled on Cooklet Beta. (http://www.go2web20.net/app/?a=cooklet) .  I had to register and set up a profile.  This site allows users to publish recipes and store them online in a series of “Recipe Books”.  It describes  itself as a “culinary and social networking platform” with the ability to organise recipes in easy to use interactive cookbooks, and as a place for sharing.  This will complement my blog because as well as my own recipes being available on Cooklet, followers will also be able to view the recipes of cooks from around the globe.

Originally Weblogs listed other website of interest to their followers (Blood, 2004).  Although some blogs now are without links, I think this would be a very useful addition to my blog.  Delicious does fulfil that function to some degree, but I decided to add a link list with direct links to other sites which I though my followers would find interesting as well.

Stavrositu and Sundar (2008) explore the notion that blogging is empowering for women.  Personally I find that this is relevant in that I get a sense of satisfaction out of sharing this knowledge about cooking, and blogging has made it possible for me to do this and reach a wide audience.  I look forward to reading comments if and when I receive them.  This has given me the motivation to explore my heritage in an interactive and productive way.

References:

Bar-Ilan, J. (2004). “An outsider’s view on ‘topic-oriented blogging’,” in Proceedings of the 13th international World Wide Web conference on Alternate track papers \& posters (New York, NY, USA: ACM), 28-34. Retrieved July 11, 2010, from: http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1013367.1013373&coll=DL&dl=GUIDE&CFID=36579776&CFTOKEN=93405651

Blood, R. (2004). “How blogging software reshapes the online community,” Commun. ACM 47, no. 12: 53-55. Retrieved July 11, 2010, from: http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1035134.1035165&coll=DL&dl=GUIDE&CFID=36579776&CFTOKEN=93405651

boyd, d. m., & Ellison, N. B. (2007). Social network sites: Definition, history, and scholarship. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 13(1), article 11.

Cooklet Beta. (n.d) Accesses August 12 from: http://www.cooklet.com/
Go2web20 (n.d.) Accessed August 12 at: http://www.go2web20.net/ 

Kennedy, L., Naaman, M., Ahern, S., Nair, R., & Rattenbury, T. (2007). How Flickr helps us make sense of the world: context and content in community-contributed media collections. Proceedings of the 15th international conference on Multimedia. Augsburg, Germany.
Available: http://infolab.stanford.edu/~mor/research/kennedyMM07.pdf

 

Learn More About Delicious. (n.d.) Accessed August 13, 2011 from: http://www.delicious.com/help/learn

Nardi, B., Schiano, D., and Gumbrecht, M. (2004).  “Blogging as social activity, or, would you let 900 million people read your diary?,” in Proceedings of the 2004 ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work (Chicago, Illinois, USA: ACM), 222-231. Retrieved July 11, 2010, from: http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1031607.1031643&coll=DL&dl=GUIDE&CFID=36579776&CFTOKEN=93405651

       Ringmar, E.  (2007). A Blogger’s Manifesto, Free Speech and Censorship in the Age of

       the Internet. London: Anthem Press.

Stavrositu, C., and Sundar, S. (2008).  “Can blogs empower women?: designing agency-enhancing and community-building interfaces,” in CHI  ’08 extended abstracts on Human factors in computing systems (Florence, Italy: ACM), 2781-2786 Retrieved July 11, 2010, from: http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1358628.1358761&coll=DL&dl=GUIDE&CFID=36579776&CFTOKEN=93405651