A Better Title

Went for a focus group discussion to help my friend in his CS341 Audience Research project. I’m not taking the module as it’s not part of the requisite for the minor.

The topic discussed: blogging.

After 3 years of blogging, I’ve to say that I’ve never really discussed about blogging to any of my friends–let alone in an actual discussion group. Yes, we usually talk about the topics we write in our blogs, but we never really talked about blogging itself.

The reason is partly that not many of my closest friends blog. Another reason is that I’m not good in vocalising my opinions. Most of the time I have problems arranging my thoughts, making it look as if I don’t know what I’m talking about and say something for the sake of saying it. I mean, just read my blog and you’ll know what I mean whenever I try to speak out my opinion. In writing it’s not so bad because I can revise and rewrite or rearrange my points, but unfortunately they’re impossible verbally.

So what happened was that the eight of us (six participants and two moderators) interacted in this conference-room-like er… room aptly called “Focus Group Room”.

And… Whatever we were saying and even our own gestures were recorded. Everything. Someone who just entered the room might not notice the four microphones on the tables and four video cameras located strategically in the corners of the room as well as the ceiling, all linked to the adjoining room which resembles a security centre, complete with all the surveillance equipments such as video and sound recorders. The two rooms are linked visually too by a layer of one-way mirror.

The topics talked about include things like what we think about the different types of blogs (personal ones such as Xiaxue, news-like (forgot what the term used was) such as mr brown, and topical such as Days Were The Those), why we blog, what we want to see when we read blogs, or even whether we do blogwalking (read unknown people’s blogs).

Then we went on to talk about how some people can be quite different in the blog and in real life… Something like a friend of one of the participants who seems to be quite happy-go-lucky in real life but sounds so depressed in the blog.

We also touched a little bit on the new technologies such as audioblogging and videoblogging, which I personally think is quite a waste of time–both to the blogger and the listener. To the blogger, producing an audioblog will definitely take up more time than typing, and the listener must follow the speed of the blogger and won’t be able to read at his own pace.

I forgot to mention the emergence of moblog–that is mobile blogging, where a blogger can upload pictures and text directly to his blog via an MMS-enabled cameraphone. This way, an event can be reported ‘live’ from the location, much like mr brown has been doing lately. I myself tried this feature with this test post and Ale’s photo. Unfortunately, I don’t have a cameraphone, so I can’t really make use of this technology. Ale’s photo was taken by himself long time ago, and was uploaded using his phone.

Oh, and one of the participants actually know Xiaxue personally…

I should have asked Bubblemunche (a.k.a. Hisreason) to come along to the discussion–it would be quite interesting to hear from him.

Anyway… It seems like work starts to pile up…

I got the position as Special Projects (Internal) Manager for ACM SIGGRAPH NTU Student Chapter, and am rallying for Designers Club Chairperson for Visual Arts Society next week. I’ll have to do a speech and show some of my portfolio to garner votes for myself. If you can come on Thursday, 25 August 2005, 7.30 p.m. at LT 22, please do and give me your support. If you do come, don’t forget to vote for Imam as the Vice Chairperson. Thanks!

Academic-wise, I’ve got quizzes coming up in Week 6, that’s two weeks from now. I also have a Curriculum Vitae due next week for CS226 Desktop Publishing, and a formal laboratory report due two weeks from now for EE2071 Laboratory 2a.

Not to be forgotten is a proposal for a research or experimental project for EE2009 Technical Communication. This one is group work, so the responsibility is split up among the five members of the group.

And… Stuff from the first three weeks, some of which I’ve been happily neglecting.

Die lah…

I think I should stop blogging for a while. If you don’t see me updating this space for the next few weeks or so, you know why… I’ll be back when I really have something very interesting to say, or when all my work is done.

See you all soon.

Oh, almost forgot:

bcc

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 17th, 2005 at 11:59 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.