Rachel Zhong

Social Networks Interview

2009-12-03T19:56:00.000-08:00

In this video, I interviewed a journalism student from UClan and asked him two questions:

(1) What do you think of social networks?

(2) What do you think of the game applications on social networks?

This post was written by Zhong Min. You can contact me at MZhong1@uclan.ac.uk

Incorporating Google Maps into News Stories

2009-10-25T16:53:00.001-07:00

(1) Posties prepare for more strikes

Following with the national industrial action being taken by the CWU (Commutation Workers Union), on 22nd October, more than 650 staff at Preston Royal Mail Center on Pittman Way, Fulwood started its strike over pay, working conditions and pensions.

On 23rd October, workers at offices on Christian Road, Preston, Braconash Road, Leyland, Whitefield Meadow, Bamber Bridge, Freckleton Road, Kirkham and the Chorley East Business Centre took part in the second day of strike action on Friday.

Location:

Preston Royal Mail Center
Christian Road Delivery Office
Braconash Road, Leyland
Whitefield Meadow, Bamber Bridge
Freckleton Road, Kirkham
The Chorley East Business Centre

View Preston Royal Mail Center in a larger map

Reasons for the choice of this news:

From this piece of hot news, it is not difficult to find that the national postal strike is expanding, and its impact is gradually growing nationwide.

Moreover, in order to give the readers more of a WYSIWYG feel, this news might be a right case to incorporate and illustrate how the postal strike expanded compared with the first day across Preston just through straightforward creation of Google Maps.

Related links:

Guardian: Postal strike day two - as it happened (A news blog post skillfully converged multimedia including: images, audio, infographs, etc into one story)
Guardian: Postal workers across the country speak out WHY they are on strike (video)

(2) Decision on Football Museum is postponed

A tangled meeting which rendered the decision on that matter of moving Preston's National Football Museum to Manchester Urbis Museum has been suspended at the 11th hour. It was postponed late Thursday afternoon after it turned out that the 14 trustees required more information of both bids to weigh and evaluate this complex and implicated issue, and get a more complete picture for the whole thing.

Location: National Football Museum, Preston & Urbis Museum, Manchester

View National Football Museum in a larger map

Reasons for the choice of this news:
The potential significant movement of Preston’s National Football Museum, which definitely evoke most Prestonians’ strong opposition.

The news content implied the fate of National Football Museum involved between two cities-Preston and Manchester, which, after all, is an appropriate case of making dynamic content. So, the aim of showing the direction in which National Football Museum might go can be easily achieved by Google Maps.

Related links:

(3) ‘Our Street is like a free car park'

One of Preston’s suburbs, Broadgate area, is ‘turning to be’ a free car park for commuters who tend to get away from rush hour in the city centre, according to the residents. A retired Preston Bus driver, of Burleigh Road, Broadgate living in this area claim he often cannot park near his home because the streets are crammed with city workers.

Location: Burleigh Road, Broadgate, Preston

View Burleigh Road, Broadgate, Preston in a larger map

Reasons for the choice of this news:
People living in Broadgate area whose claim really revealed the ubiquitous phenomenon in Preston. Worse still, the city council couldn’t have conducted a scheme for this issue without further investigation corporated with people living there, and the situation is getting worse.

On the other hand, due to the strong “where” element within this news, it is easy to mark up the Broadgate area in Preston, especially for the full view on Google Maps.

Related links:

LEP: Fury as parking restrictions are extended

(4) Square's trees face the axe in revamp

1/7 of the healthy trees in Winckley Square are going to be cut down for "design reasons", increasing light, changing footpaths and access, and improving surveillance of the historic square, which is regarded as part of a £3m revamp plan, Preston City Council's planning committee is about to vote on the rest part of this scheme later this year.

Location: Winckley Square, Preston

View Winckley Square, Preston in a larger map

Reasons for the choice of this news:
‘Square's trees face the axe in revamp’ arouse readers’ controversial comments on the LEP website towards city council committee’s “design reasons” for chopping down healthy trees in Winckley Square.

Thereby, why don’t we just have a look at the truly state of virescence on the historic Winckley Square through visual map presentation? Does it really go against the city design?

Related links:

LEP: Winckley Square 'totem pole' now two meters shorter

This post was written by Zhong Min. You can contact me at MZhong1@uclan.ac.uk

Preston City council,Town Hall

2009-10-18T16:28:00.000-07:00

The imposing Preston City Council,Town Hall is located on Lancaster Road. From the images above, it is not difficult to find the distinguish logo of Preston's patron saint, Lamb of St Wilfred with word " Town Hall" on the blue plate.

Preston City Council, a portion of the two-tier local government system, is now working as a district council together with Lancashire County Council.

In order to serve the overall public , Preston City Council spends on average over £100,000,000 on public service within each year.

The basic function of Preston City Council is to provide local residents service and information such as collecting and recycling garbage from preston households, likewise, keeping street litters free, examing every food premise, offering two entertainment centres for nearly 1,000,000 people, possessing the public parks and open spaces, holding shows, events and attractions and dealing with large number of tourist enquiries etc.

Reference
Preston city council(2008).'About the council '. Available at: http://www.preston.gov.uk/council-and-democracy/about-the-council/. Accessed 18 October 2009

This post was written by Zhong Min. You can contact me at MZhong1@uclan.ac.uk

Web content writing & SEO guidance

2009-10-18T03:53:00.001-07:00

(Other source related to Writing for the web and SEO)

When it comes to the impact convergence has on distribution stage of content, it is necessary to look at the basics of starting point proactively on how people read online content, why and how to write for the web.

How people read content on the web

Writing for the web is largely differ from content written in printed matter and other media in rushed modern life. Currently, people get used to scanning through content on the web quickly rather than reading word-for-word (saying nothing of the whole article).

Besides, Jakob Nielsen's study shows that people read only 20%~28% of an individual web page averagely, the more word count contains the smaller the percentage it gets. It’s all about people tending to optimize online behavior by being productive and active, indeed, they are likely to skip over the unworthy page and look for information foraging. Unless they found the attractive content meet their needs, or they might continue seeking other worthy sites through search engines.

Why writing web content

As a result of this user-driven cyberspace, in order to speed up web users' reading, grab their attention and build users base in a proper way etc, it has been being of crucial importance to write and present the SEO-friendly (say, scannable, concise and objective) content for web users towards boosting site's traffic and optimizing your site's usability.

University of Oxford highlighted the relevant guides when writing for the web on its website:

Place important content at the top of the page.
Include words and phrases.
Use short paragraphs, keep your pages short
Written and proof-read before being published
Use headings to summaries paragraphs and sub-sections

Trenton Moss, the founder of an industry-leading user experience consultancy--Webcredible, concluded 8 tips of his study on the aspects of content & usability as well, in his article he suggested that we could make best of limited but clear and plain language, worthy hyperlink text and lists, only put one idea in single paragraph, bolden the vital words to help achieve the ultimate aim of web content writing.

Guidance on writing SEO-friendly content on the web

As people now often browse particular sites via search engine more preferably than visiting the individual site, how to make the content can be more easily found and attractive to the search engine has become a subject to explore. Here are the core aspects need weighing and considering:

Key words (words or phrases describe content)
Headlines (Standout and prominent ‘3W’: Who-names, Where-places, What-things of a story)
Links (link to extra source of information, similar to the context stage of Paul Bradshaw’s 21st Century Newsroom model)
Audience (based on '3W', serves interest)

Apart from the essential ways above what will be the other ways to write and present content so that it can be found on search engines? Except something has been told in lecture, there is some other guidance we might try to follow conducted by some universities, industrial specialists or scholars found online:

A SEO Specialist Shannon O’Brien also lists the guidance on web-writing in her blog post ‘Writing for the Web is Good SEO’:

Write concisely, focus on user benefit
Begin with your most important ideas; follow with supporting content
Use bulleted lists to clean up text
Use headers & subheaders to organize
Include informative keywords/phrases within the beginning of each header (do NOT use “click here”)

Other resource about ‘Top 10 Tips to write SEO friendly article’ by Amit Jain also can be found at: http://blog.girnarsoft.com/2008/04/top-10-tips-to-write-seo-friendly.html

Furthermore, Google has launched its user-friendly Google Website Optimizer, which enable us to test the site content by listening to the visitors, increasing conversions and eliminate guesswork etc.

Reference

Moss, T. (2005). ‘Content & usability: Writing for the web’. Available at: http://www.webcredible.co.uk/user-friendly-resources/web-usability/web-content.shtml. Accessed 17th October 2009
O’Brien, S. (2009). ‘Writing for the Web is Good SEO’. Available at: http://www.fluencymedia.com/articles/seo-writing-for-web/. Accessed 17th October 2009
University of Oxford. (2009). ‘Writing for the Web’. Available at: http://www.ox.ac.uk/web/guides/writing_for_the_web.html. Accessed 17th October 2009

This post was written by Zhong Min. You can contact me at MZhong1@uclan.ac.uk

This is my first post on Blogger

2009-09-26T06:22:00.000-07:00

Hello, Blogger. My name is Zhong Min (Rachel), and I am a year 2 student of UClan majoring in BA(Hons) Media Management.This is my brand new Blogger. Actually,it is the first post of my first blog in the strict sense.

Why blog? From my point of view, with blogging emerging as one of the front-runners in today's Web 2.0 era, Blogging has become one of the fastest ways to participate in online communities. What's more, in this converging media world, we may clearly see that audios, videos and pictures etc all the elements could be converged into a blog, or even a post. Blog, gradually, is being contributing to the alteration of the way people produce and manage current news content. In other words, blogging is getting people involved over time in converge world.

Apparently, blog, as a sort of converged platform, is permeating of people's lives.

Being a newcomer for blogosphere, I am seeking free blogging services for the time being. The search results of Google demonstrate that there have been large numbers of free blogging services at present, and as far as I aware, WordPress, Blogger, Yahoo 360, AOLJournals,Windows Live Spaces, Xanga, LiveJournal,Vox.etc are the world's best free, likewise, popular blogging platforms.

Broadly speaking, these free blogs are easy to establish and configure, which only consumes us few minutes to catch the key things, like creating a new account and blog's name, customrizing all those respective settings etc.(Good.2009)

The advantages (Pros) of having a free blogging service may be to get operational and user-friendly blog tools at a free level, also we could post immediately and frequently, which is able to keep our blog up to date.
The drawbacks (Cons) mainly fall on the lack of comprehensive and diverse customization features, limited branding, only fair search engine optimization.

There are several reasons why I choose Blogger. First and foremost, it is a free and simple service from Google, and I could start my Blogger through my Google Account directly. Moreover, customizations, free or self-edited html for the templates are all maintained by Blogger as well. Last but not least, Blogger also has good user interface such as featured and popular Gadgets and accessible themes although the options are limited.

Reference
Good,R.(2009). 'Create A Blog: Best Free Hosted Blog Publishing Services - Mini-Guide'. Available at: http://www.masternewmedia.org/create-a-blog-best-free-hosted-blog-publishing-services-mini-guide/. Accessed 28 September 2009

This post was written by Zhong Min. You can contact me at MZhong1@uclan.ac.uk