Cr. whatoliviadid.com

At the start of the semester,  I remember feeling a bit overwhelmed by the amount of content that I’ll have to publish online since this is my first time blogging. The word “publishing” had a serious connotation to me and I used to picture the mundane imagery of book publishers doing monotonous editing work at print companies. As I get to learn how to put up content online with WordPress, I realized publishing is a lot less stressful from what I used to think. Blogging on Half Milk and Sugar has allowed me to establish my online self as a friendly individual and create content that I am genuinely interested in. 

I originally created Half Milk and Sugar to blog about cafes reviews so I could justify my unhealthy obsession with sweet drinks and dessert. After a few consecutive weeks of blogging, I realized caffeine and sugar don’t just satisfy my sweet cravings but they also keep me awake and alive throughout the week. With the amount of workload I have for taking 14 credits this semester, visiting and trying out a new cafe each week is a great way to treat myself. These sweet delights have slowly become my motivation to work, how I boost concentration during work, and how I derive relaxation from work.

What I want to share on Half Milk and Sugar is not only ratings for food but also the experience that I enjoyed. This is why I started to develop more content that describes the interior of the places I went. Cakes and drinks may be finished within a few bites or sips, but the spatial enjoyment of a place lasts. As someone who is enthralled by how the ambiance and design can promote a specific vibe for the cafe, I took the effort to research the rationale behind each interior design of the restaurants and strive to share information that goes beyond ordinary food commentary. 

Targeting young audience that also derive pleasure from cafe experiences, I named my blog “Half Milk and Sugar” to make it sound like something you’d say when you order at a cafe. This helps me set a fun and conversational tone for my individual online self. To attract more audience on my site, I set up an Instagram account, linked my blog in the biography and posted photos of my food reviews where I use hashtags and tagged the restaurant location. By diversifying the platforms I use to publish my content and incorporating lofi cafe beats into my reviews, my bounce rate for these sites have decreased by 20%. 

Looking from my Google Analytics, I learnt that most of my audience are other students from Canada. Although the geographic location expanded to Asia and even Europe after I started writing reviews on popular Asian desserts, the number of visitors from other foreign countries was still under 10. Knowing that there are already copious food bloggers with a large following on Instagram, I kept asking myself why would people want to follow my new account instead of looking at popular foodie pages like Dished Vancouver that’s already on the platform? 

I felt quite out of place at that time and I even set my Instagram account to private to test out and reflect on what’s the best way to market my content. Gertz (2015) has however pointed out that we should stop chasing these superficial numbers of following. His words enlightened me to start thinking how I should treat my content and design to reflect my subtle personality instead. He raises an important point that the content we publish should speak to the few people who can identify with our personalities and interests because this is the only audience that matters. His inspiring advice reminded me why I created Half Milk and Sugar in the first place and pushed me forward to continue with my publishing work. 

Reflecting on this struggle I had during the blogging process, I think I was restricting my role of a publisher as every other foodie. Thorn (2012) argues in his article that “rather than defining yourself by the medium you create, define yourself by what you offer to your audience.” By sharing honest reviews and offering quiet cafe suggestions for doing work, I am inviting a group of audience from my local community in Canada that resonates with my busy college experience to find comfort and motivation in desserts. Even though I can’t be physically there to support these audience, I think I am providing a kind of spiritual support to them by encouraging them to treat themselves better after a long week of class. 

As Van Djik (2013) argues in his article, there is a noticeable change occurred in the organization and architecture of social media platforms where the centre of gravity have shifted from connectedness to connectivity. This suggests that millennials are more concerned about the actual numbers of ‘friending’, ‘liking’, ‘connecting’ and ‘following’ instead of the intimacy of relationships on social media platforms. I realized I should not be blinded by these numbers and focus on delivering relatable and useful content for my audience instead. I’m really thankful that my partners for my peer reviews gave me insightful and in-depth comments for improving the usability of my site. For example, I really took their advice and categorized all my content to just ‘posiel’ and ‘reviews’ blog posts so that it is easier to navigate content and enhance the user-experience for my audience.  

I believe this is not the end of my blogging journey. From designing the minimalist theme for my blog to uploading weekly cafes reviews, Half Milk and Sugar sparked my interest in publishing content that I am passionate about. I would definitely continue my dessert reviews on my Instagram and I hope to reach more audience that also rely on sugar and caffeine as their fuel so that we can all celebrate our sweet cravings here together.

References:
Gertz, Travis. 2015. “Design Machines. How to survive in the digital Apocalypse.” July 2015. Available from: https://louderthanten.com/articles/story/design-machines

Thorn, J. (2012, November 4). Make Your Thing. Transom. Retrieved from https://transom.org/2012/jesse-thorn-make-your-thing/

Van Dijck, J. (2013, March 14). ‘You have one identity’: performing the self on Facebook and LinkedIn. Media, Culture & Society, 35(2). Retrieved from https://doi.org/10.1177/0163443712468605

As a communication major student that has a great interest in coming up with ideas to promote various activities or brands, I really enjoyed the marketing campaign activity that our guest speakers asked us to participate in. We were asked to hold up cards with the marketing campaign names on them and flip over them to show the picture of this campaign when a student asks about it. One of the campaigns that I was most amazed about was the blood donation campaign where brands and signs drop the letters A, B, and O to raise awareness towards the lack of blood available and encourage people to donate blood. After this activity, I realize that marketing doesn’t limit to ads, but also all forms of creative ideas that are immersive in our daily lives. Inspired by this activity and the “Pokemon as Transmedia Storytelling” reading, I came up with the idea of incorporating cafe music recommendations along with my dessert and cafe reviews. Apart from using images and texts to show and describe the taste of different cakes and drinks, adding relaxing lofi cafe music to my blog posts can bring a more aesthetic and immersive cafe experience to my readers, thus reinforces my blog concept as a virtual online cafe. As Jenkins suggests, “Transmedia storytelling is the ideal aesthetic form for an era of collective intelligence. ” I should make good use of the various forms of medium available to market my blog.

Reference:
Kevinbrittenylauren.wordpress.com. 2013. “Pokemon as transmedia storytelling. https://kevinbrittenylauren.wordpress.com/2013/11/21/pokemon-as-transmedia-storytelling/

sneak peak of the next review i’m blogging!

I still remember reading about this guy who claimed he came back from the 3700 future and warned everyone that humans will be controlled by robots. Back in 2005, this sounded like some sci-fi non sense to me. Now that is 2019, I’m totally convinced that guy did came back from 2046. Although for now humans aren’t slaves of gigantic robots that look like the transformers, we have already become slaves to technology. It’d be a really technological determinist thing for me to blame technology for changing how we live, but I can’t help but ponder about the increasing technological influence in our daily lives. I remember Suzanne brought up the example of how a girl suddenly got a bunch of baby and pregnancy products recommended to her when her menstruation tracking app realized she missed her period that month. I think it’s really ironic how we invented all these app and technology to make our lives better yet they seem to shape the way we live now. Knowing how powerful and profitable technology can be, it’s hard for Google to not consider about building a search engine that comply with China’s censorship on sensitive content since China has a big market. Facebook also realizes its power owing to infrastructural imperialism that it can launch Free Basics to third worlds and offer them Facebook as a substitution of an actual internet, branching out their power across the globe regardless of how useful their technology actually is. Reading about these news just reinforces how technology has a dominating power in the world we’re living in right now, it might not even take 2000 more years to get to the point where we are completely controlled by robots.

References:
Brian Fung. October 16, 2018. Google really is trying to build a censored Chinese search engine, its CEO confirms
Mike Elgan. 2016. “The surprising truth about Facebook’s Internet.org.” http://www.computerworld.com/article/3032646/internet/the-surprising-truth-about-facebooks-internetorg.html#tk.rss_all

My online self is quite anonymous to people, which is why there is no face to my body. Since I’m blogging about dessert and drinks review here, I’d say 55% of my online self is composed of sugar.

I think I’m not the only one who notice the amount of “Our site uses cookies” that has been increasingly appearing online. It’s weird that I’ve sort of got used to clicking agree to all these tabs that appear on the sites, since I used to be frantic over the idea of someone tracking my data when I visit a site. Analytics now don’t just focus on a micro level where we can track a certain IP address of someone who left a hate comment online. Analytical tools for big data collection is now widely used in most online platforms. From the companies or content creators’ perspective, users’ data are essentially as precious as oil to their business. Understanding their users and how they behave allow them to market their content to the right audience thus boost sales profit. But for users, it could definitely be stressful knowing that our personal data are being tracked and used for algorithms and ads.

In this information age, it is inevitable that we leave digital footprints online nowadays, where the information of our behavior online are constantly tracked. We can use incognito windows and private browsing on our phone, but once we get out and use our credit cards, we are giving away our mode of consumption to banks and retailers. Basically, any of our behaviour that involves digital technology would be recorded and tracked. I think this is why we therefore all sort of all accepted the fact that this is how technology works and do little to protect our data.