Online Editing

    In this week's reading, Carroll talks about the importance of mastering online editing and all the many components that people tend to forget that differ greatly from editing other types of publications. One of the things that he explained is one of the most important things to remember is the appearance aspect. When novels, books, essays, or other types of writings are published, the appearance aspect obviously wouldn't be as important because most of what the viewer sees is merely text, other then the front cover. In my own experiences, when I created this blog, my own personal blog, and a group blog for another communications class (mediaandsustainability.blogspot.com) I realized that I was definitely more caught up in what the layout and styling aspect of the blog would be instead of the actual content. One good thing about online writing though is that I feel like I can be myself more have more freedom and not bound to specific boundaries or structures in writing that I would have to submit to a professor.

   On page 121, Carroll talks about how to edit a text chunk in a way that is more pleasing to people and essentially more "readable." As we have learned from the article written by Carr who questions our intelligence with this fast-paced development of the digital age, people tend not to care too much for actually reading, or at least not lengthly texts when they are reading online. Hence, Carroll says the best way to be informative about a subject, but at the same time grabbing peoples attention, is by taking advantage of bullet points. It's funny because this reminded me of BuzzFeed which I absolutely enjoy using as a source of procrastination everyday. BuzzFeed covers everything from funny pictures, cute gifs, somewhat "informative" videos, to actual long and lengthly articles. I don't know how many people actually go on that website and actually sit down and read those lengthly articles, but I know for certain that I am not one to do so. Though I once enjoyed reading for pleasure, my attention span is no longer the same.

   Anyway, I'm starting to stray a little off topic. Another thing that stuck with me as I was reading this was how many more people are involved in the process of online editing. For most websites, there are so many tabs on the website that link people to different things such as on news websites there would be different categories (sports, international, political, etc) and websites such as buzzfeed or reddit would have categories such as (new, entertainment, life, etc). All of these components have to be updated every single day. Most people probably don't even check those websites every single day (actually, I probably do...) but there are still a good few that do, so it is those peoples jobs who created the website to make sure they still have all these viewer's attention. 

Just as I finished this blog post..I came across a link a friend had posted on Facebook with a funny gif! Thinking it was probably buzzfeed or some other silly website like that, I clicked on it, only to find out that it was a link to Huffington Post! Weird..it's an article about personal hygiene (not surprisingly) but it was surprising that they are using gifs now!

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/11/08/personal-hygiene-facts_n_4217839.html?utm_hp_ref=mostpopular#slide=2276894