This web presence has been produced as an inspiration and reference point for people or organisations who want ideas for they can contribute meaningfully to local and global citizenship. It uses Web 2.0 based services to link a number of online identities in order to communicate with a broach range of people with a broad range of online information sourcing preferences. I have kept my personal information to a minimum as I feel it serves no purpose to the web presence, which is really the reader as a gentle altruist.
The central node of this web presence is a blog, for which web-based blogging service, Blogger, was used to create it. Wordpress, another web-based blogging service, was also explored but discarded because of some limitations within the templates for adding and linking with other elements of the web presence. A blog was chosen as the central node because of its suitability for regularly adding information of varying length and content and because the entries are irregular a blog allows the reader to subscribe and receive notifications when a new entry is made. The design is founded on a standard free template offered by the service with a title block created using GIMP, a free image manipulation program, and COLOURlovers, another web-based service for creating and remixing patterns under a Creative Commons License. The layout is an uncluttered two-column format, with diary-like entries on one side and links to other relevant information on the other side. The colour scheme and style were chosen to be neutral so as to not detract from the content and avoid bold or dynamic in keeping with the ‘gentle’ web presence theme.
The first contributing node is bookmarking site, Delicious. I have chosen to link in a web based bookmarking account because it provides enormous opportunity for like-minded people to find further information relevant to them. Delicious helps me to manage related websites via an online account, as opposed to localised bookmarking on personal computer’s web browser, contributes to the central node via RSS feed, and any tags or keywords and notes about that website can be made within the bookmark data so that like items can be grouped within my profile. Further to this Delicious suggests tag terms and generates metadata by collocating tags from anyone who has also tagged that website (Mathes, 2004). I am able to network with other Delicious users, see who has tagged a particular site and other websites that user has tagged creating a web and database of information that is likely to be more relevant to my interest.
The second contributing node is microblogging site, Twitter. Twitter is used for real time publication of information which short in length and another way of tagging relevant information. When posting to Twitter hash tags and mentions can be used which alert related people and create search terms and trending topics. Rettberg (2008, pp. 59-60)uses Granovetter’s observations of weak connections in fact being very strong, and Twitter is an excellent example of that theory; where connections are frequently with complete strangers but there is a sense of interest with which users follow one another. Unexpected activity from the Twitter feed was a mention of ‘#kiva’ in one of my tweets on April 22nd which was noticed by Paper.li ("The #kiva Daily," 2011), via Twitter profile Pay4PlayAnalyst, a company that searches for relevant content and produces a daily paper, notifying those who are in it. The Gentle Altruist profile was listed for that day under the Business section of The #kiva Daily and directed viewers of the paper to the central node. A retweet I published on May 7th also appeared on FairTradeAU's website twitter RSS feed in real time.
The third contribution node is a YouTube channel where I have gathered a collection of videos that are relevant to the theme of the web presence. Rather than being my own production these videos mostly come from other sources where content is usually information based and provides a way of referring people to other types of information, such as presentations and firsthand accounts of this subject matter.
I have added a fourth contributing node of Facebook due to the social network’s scale, accessibility and diversity. Boyd (2008, p. 220) also points out that the relationships of networks in social network services, for example Facebook, are not typical of real life friendships and this part of the web presence complements the Twitter node, as there are still many people who are not part of the Twitter community; Facebook can be linked to automatically post feeds from Twitter where I choose. I feel that the four contributing nodes used have slightly different networking abilities and therefore complement one another as well as have a slightly different reach.
Additional elements of the right hand column are a tag cloud which summarises the tags associated with all posts and provides an indication of the number of times a particular tag has been used, either by a number adjacent the tag name or its font size which gives readers an easy way of locating posts relating to a particular topic. In one way this mimics the tags from the Delicious connection, except that readers are only searching for relevant information within my central node. An archive in calendar format, the ability to subscribe to posts via RSS feed or email and a site search field have also been included. I felt these were an important part of this central node as readers may come back some time later after remembering something they read.
I feel that this presence has effectively used a number of Web 2.0 components to reach people with a broad range of interests and web activity, and provide them with information that they might explore further something that is of interest to them. I believe its identity has remained consistent across each of its nodes to create a smooth transition when the viewer moves from one web service to another, giving them the opportunity to explore outside of the presence and find their way back easily. Creating it has also provided me with a valuable insight into the benefits of finding appropriate web tools that broaden the reach of an online identity.
References
boyd, d. m. (2008). Social Network Sites: Definition, History and Scholarship Journal of computer-Mediated Communication (Vol. 13, pp. 210-230)
The #kiva Daily. (2011). Paper.li Retrieved May 1, 2011, from http://paper.li/tag/kiva/2011/04/22
Mathes, A. (2004). Folksonomies - Cooperative Classification and Communication Through Shared Metadata Retrieved May 15, 2011, from http://www.adammathes.com/academic/computer-mediated-communication/folksonomies.html
Rettberg, J. (2008). Blogs, Communities and Networks Blogging (pp. 57-83). Cambridge: Polity Press
