Thesis/Dissertation

Draft 1 -22/2/2009

Title :

Blogs as a Platform for Composition Writing in Malay Language

Chapter 1

Introduction

The rapid growth of Information Technology and Communication has changed roles of internet users in the World Wide Web. With the Web 2.0 technologies, most of the World Wide Web users are now not passive consume or retrieve information from the internet anymore. They can be active contributors and collaborate with the wide communities on the web. One of the tools created in conjunction with web 2.0 technologies is the weblogs. By using blogs, we will be able to read, write and publish our work online to a larger audience. The best part of it is that it is free if we are using the hosted blog software. A hosted blog is one where all data and the publishing interface reside on the server of the blogging software company like Blogger.com, WordPress.com, MySpace, greasy.com, LiveJournal. Blogs enables blogger to create content, comment, reflect, collaborate, sharing information and connected to a worldwide community.

Weblogs Definition

Blogs or Weblogs is a personal online journal or website which can be easily created using the Graphical User Interface provided by the blogging software without any programming knowledge or technical expertise. (Blood, 2002b:12) A weblog is best defined as “a website that is up-dated frequently, with new material posted at the top of the page. Theresa Ross Embrey (2002) in Teacher Librarian December 2002 defined Weblogs as “a cross between a diary, a web site and an online community “. Weblogs – or blogs for short—began as websites that listed annotated hyperlinks to other websites containing interesting, curious, hilarious and/or generally newsworthy content located by the publisher of the weblogs ( Lankshear & Knobel, 2003). A typical blog site consists of “a single page of entries which are accessible by the public, arranged in reverse chronological order, containing hyperlinks to other blogs or web sites, and written by a single author” (Guenther, 2005) A blog is web publishing software which allows users to create and edit the content of a web page with a minimum of technical expertise (Holtz, 2006). Technically, blogs are also known as CMS or Content Management Systems. Being a CMS blog allow the write to easily publish to specific Web site and manage the content without the need to deal with the program code (Tan, 2008).