EXEGESIS

BUNBURY’S proximity to Perth makes the town an ideal location for touring local and international bands to play mid-week shows, usually before they play at Perth venues like the Rosemount or Amplifier. It is the ideal warm-up location for mainstream bands like Thirsty Merc to acts as obscure as Richard In Your Mind or Loose Unit. While there are two local papers covering the Bunbury music scene, there is no online presence dedicated to covering the strongest WA music scene outside the metropolitan area. Through my central node, the Blogspot blog South West Music, I aimed to fill that gap with band interviews, live music reviews and up-to-date tour announcements. In essence, I will be fulfilling the role of a citizen music journalist in a hyper-local format, targeting a very specific audience.

The initial choices in making my web presence creation were obviously which theme to tackle, and then finding nodes to fit this theme. The decision to focus on online music journalism was an easy one. I have been writing about music in one form or another for ten years, and the Bunbury music scene is by far the strongest music scene outside of the metropolitan area and would therefore offer a wide scope of interviews, tour announcement and live reviews.

The decision to use Blogspot as my central node was based on the experiences several friends have had with the website and Rebecca Blood’s comments relating to Blogger. I spoke to three bloggers I know – Ian Lenton, who blogs at http://australianspeculation.blogspot.com, Matt Cowgill, who blogs at www.palace-foods.com, and Steph Edwardes, who blogs at http://skittlebraus.blogspot.com and they all recommended Blogspot for its ease of use. Rebecca Blood, in a post from Rebecca’s Pocket on September 7, 2000, said that Blogger “…places not restrictions on the form of content being posted. Its web interface, accessible from any browser, consists of an empty form box in which the blogger can type…anything.” (Blood, 2000).

For the template, I chose the Blogger-created Minima Dark after trailing several other layouts. I found Minima Dark easy to read with a dark background and white text, the headline box seemed to ‘pop out’ more than any other template. I also chose to add a photo to the top of the blog, with the image being of Bunbury music fans at the recent Groovin’ The Moo festival – used with the permission of the photographer, David Bailey. Using the Blogspot gadgets, I also included a links section to a range of Western Australian, Australian and International music journalism websites, as well as a link to the booking agent for the Prince of Wales Hotel and one of the local papers. Of course I also included an RSS link that will allow people to easily receive updates on the website directly to their desktop.

I chose to keep the ‘about’ section of my central node as brief as possible. Two of my favourite blogs – www.palace-foods.com and www.beaufortstreetblog.blogspot.com have extremely brief about sections. I also felt that the information presented in the content of the blog, through tour updates and interviews, was fairly self explanatory.

While the theme of my central node was that of a citizen music journalist, it needed to be able to expose people to bands coming to Bunbury that they may not have seen before. This was the main reason I chose Youtube as my first contributing node. While I do not have the ability to upload videos, the ability to ‘favourite’ Youtube music videos of bands coming to Bunbury allowed me to have a channel dedicated to showcasing bands that would be appearing in Bunbury soon, therefore fitting in with the overall theme of my web presence assignment. My second node, Flickr, allows me to post photos of bands playing in Bunbury and it also allows me to post these photos directly to my central node, reinforcing the central premise of my web presence creation and creating a network. My final node, Twitter, allows me to post short updates, either notifying followers of a new tour announcement or an update on my central node. All nodes contain a link back to the central node, further reinforcing the main theme of my web presence creation.

In the greater context of the web communications 101 unit, South West Music fits into the realm of citizen journalism. In particular, it specifically fits in with the notion of hyperlocal citizen journalism discussed in the 2004 Washington Post article "On Local Sites, Everyone's A Journalist" by Leslie Walker. South West Music deals specifically with Bunbury music, through interviewing bands playing in Bunbury, announcing tours that will come to the town, displaying photos of bands playing in Bunbury and review albums of bands that have, or are highly likely to, play in Bunbury. I have in essence turned myself from a creator of media - living in Bunbury and being an avid music fan, I would consume any media relating to the live music scene in Bunbury - to a producer of media.

My blogs and my three external nodes allow me to utilise the speed referenced by Jill Walker Rettberg on Page 66 of Blogging, where she states “One of the major advantages of citizen media is speed. Major Events are reported as rapidly by the people who experience them as by mainstream media.” (Rettberg, 2008).

In conclusion my web presence creation, by utilising Blogspot as my central node and twitter, youtube and flickr as my three external nodes allows me to act as a citizen journalist, filling a much-needed gap in the market that exists in Bunbury live music scene. By establishing a consistent theme across the four sites, I have established my network of Web 2.0 sites as a one stop shop, if you will, for information on the Bunbury Live Music Scene.



References

http://skittlebraus.blogspot.com

http://australianspeculation.blogspot.com

http://palace-foods.com

Blood, Rebecca. “Weblogs: A History And Perspective”, Rebecca’s Pocket. 07 September 2000. http://rebeccablood.net/essays/weblog_history.html

Walker, Leslie. “On Local Sites, Everyone’s A Journalist”, The Washington Post. 09 December 2004, Page EO1