Thursday, 29 October 2009

Student: Paul O' Byrne (09006483)
Chosen blog: Kotaku
Chosen post: Candles? We Don't Need No Stinkin' Candles

The author: The blog is maintained by a team of ten writers from around the globe so as to keep updates frequent and steady throughout the day. The blog’s Editor-in-Chief Brian Crecente is aided by two Deputy Editors four Contributing editors a Correspondent and two Columnists . They are spread around the globe with most of them in America, with others in places such as Australia and Japan.

Main Topics: The main topics of the updates on this blog are all related to video games in some way and can easily identified by the grey box that accompanies each update. The topics range from game reviews to console previews to development news to rumours. Many updates are simply video or pictures with minimal writing that the blogger has found on a different site and wish for his reader to see (Example) while others, mostly the game reviews, are in-depth pieces with many pictures and screenshots and a much higher wordcount.

Post Frequency: Updates are posted every twenty minutes to hour, this frequency I expect would be much higher during large events such as ComicCon or e3. One downside to this high frequency of posting is that it almost becomes a chore to look through every one. If I missed a day checking the site I could have anywhere up to 100 posts to check the next day and I’d prefer not to miss any news when all I have to do is scroll down to see it.

Target Audience: The target audience is people who like to play video games and who like to keep up to date with current development news or people who just want another opinion before they buy a game.

Language, Graphics, Embedded Artifacts: The language is quite casual and friendly. This makes it much less intimidating to comment on updates as there is no apparent difference between the language of the bloggers and the language of the commenters, it much more conversational, or at least as conversational as text can be.
The graphic design is simple and effective with four areas on the main page that are easily distinguishable:
The days ‘headlines’ on the top of the page, each with their own picture and title
A more mysterious bar containing a comment bar, presumably to comment on the site itself rather than specific updates or perhaps to let the team know of a piece of news they may have missed
Then on the left under this is a description to the blogging team complete with e-mail addresses and twitter pages
And finally the piece which takes up the largest part of the screen, the updates themselves each distinguishable from the others by their title and grey box containing a hash tag.
Embedded on the page there is usually at least one picture or video (youtube.com etc.) for each update. These are usually screenshots from a game or photographs of upcoming technology. A popular feature is the side by side comparison videos between different platforms running the same game allowing people to argue about which they feel is better (usually the one they own).

Interaction: Comments can be found on every update and as it is required that you audition to be able to comment the quality and relevance to the topic is always very good. On many updates you can see that conversations start between commenters as they reply to each others comments. This creates an almost forum-like feel to the comments section of the blog. I have a bad habit of not actually reading who posts the comments and so am unable to say how much the bloggers themselves reply to the comments on the blog.

Favourite post: My Favourite post is this post regarding the carving of pumpkins into famous videogame characters, namely Pac-Man and his ghosts. Wakka Wakka
It shows very well the humour of the blog and it target audience

No comments:

Post a Comment