BLOGGING AND THE CURRENT STATE OF ICT IN SEA

PROPONENTS:

Ellise Dane Keziah Valde

Houris Aisah Unos

Sittie Farisha Ugokan

OBJECTIVES

1.      Make a simple research on the current state of ICT in SEA.

2.      Compare and contrast the nuances (differences) of varied online blogging sites and make recommendation.

3.      Identify the state of ICT in South East Asia and its impact to the society.

4.      Compare and contrast the state of ICT in South East Asia.

DEFINITION OF TERMS

·         Information and communications technology (ICT) – an  extended term for information technology (IT) which stresses the role of unified communications and the integration of telecommunications (telephone lines and wireless signals), computers as well as necessary enterprise software, middleware, storage, and audio-visual systems, which enable users to access, store, transmit, and manipulate information.

RESEARCH CONTENTS

·         Blogging Sites from 3 credible sources

From StyleCaster:

1.      Blog.com

It’s free to start a blog here, and you’ll be able to choose from several gorgeous themes. You can also upgrade to their premium package and receive your own domain name.

2.      Blogger.com

 Perhaps one of the most well-known platforms, Blogger is backed by Google, so it’s trustworthy and reliable. It’s incredibly simple to start using Blogger as the site takes you step-by-step through creating your site. There are a lot of customization options and you can purchase templates through outside website as well.

3.      Medium.com

Founded in 2012 by Evan Williams (Twitter, Blogger) and Biz Stone (Twitter), this platform offers a distinct story-telling feel.

4.      Penzu.com

Penzu is loved because of its versatility: There are three different types of journals you can start when you sign up for the site: Daily Diary (public), Expressive Journal (private), and Travel Journal (great if you’re going on a trip). You can also try the site out before you sign up for it as well.

5.      Squarespace.com

Defintiely the most creative, modern and professional of the 10 platforms, SquareSpace is the only pricey option but will surely deliver the best results. Amazing for photographers, store owners, bloggers, musicians and business owners, this platform features tons of templates that will keep your blog looking polished and professional.

6.      Svbtle.com

A super-slick and modern platform, Svbtle feels more like a doodle pad.

7.      Tumblr.com

Tumblr is easily the best of the 10 platforms when it comes to visuals. Images, videos, music—it’s all really easy to display on your tumblr profile. And, there are tons of creative ways that you can showcase them. People can also “reblog” your posts leaving you with more followers and a larger fanbase.

8.      Webs.com

This is a great platform to use if you’re looking to create more of a professional environment for your readers. You can drag and drop elements around your site for the ultimate customized page. The site also featured an ecommerce feature—great if you’re trying to sell a product.

9.      Weebly.com

 Weebly features tons of unique and modern themes to start you blog off looking fresh. It also offers ecommerce, an iPhone app for posting on the go, and easy linking to your social media. This site is surely dummy-free and makes it as easy as possible for you to dive right into the blogging scene.

10.  Wix.com

Wix features hundreds of unique and very professional-looking  templates that can easily be customized to keep your blog unique and different from everyone else’s. You can also add apps onto your site as well as an online store and your links to your social media accounts.

From DEARBLOGGER:

1.      WordPress

Setup nowadays so easy Snoop Dogg can do it with the elegance of NYTimes, Sony PlayStation, Wall Street Journal, Paris Hilton and more. WordPress requires no coding knowledge and is free software – it’s the domain name and hosting you pay about-as-much-as-a-cup-of-coffee-per-month for. It gives you a website like the world’s best and teaches you all about websites, too. For countless bloggers who do this for a living, WordPress.org is the best place to blog, and it continues to be the largest blogging community on the web

2.      WordPress

WordPress.com is a free blog-hosting site with roughly half the features of .org. The general idea here is less maintenance for you, but less control of the blog. Get a .wordpress domain name like “dearblogger.wordpress.com” or pay to use your own domain name. Need a niche? WordPress.com sees 100,000 posts published each day so you’ll surely find like-minded thinkers. Not a full company website but a loyal companion for one. Write posts, try a free theme, set up social media buttons and learn blogging at WordPress.com.

3.      Blogger

Blogger is Google’s free blog-hosting site. More popular at the turn of the millenium, Blogger still offers a great service but the designs are a bit elementary. Login and publish your first post for free with only a Gmail account. Try Adsense “monetization”, design a new layout and even edit your first piece of code.

4.      Tumblr

At a time when WordPress and Blogger were neck-and-neck for new users, Tumblr showed up as the 3rd guy to the party. They received lots of sign-ups from users wanting a totally refreshing take on blogging, and have grown ever since. Tumblr was recently bought by Yahoo, who has interesting plans for the whole blog advertising thing.

5.      SquareSpace

All over television with beautiful and encouraging ads, SquareSpace offers a nice solution for the business owner in need of a web presence. Get online quickly with a free trial, setup a cool design and start attracting clients – that’s the motto. If a more complex blogging platform were snowboarding, SquareSpace would be skiing, in the pie wedge stance 

6.      Google+

If you need a guide on how to use Google Plus we’ve got you covered, because we’ve been trying to dominate it for a year now. Fun features like the badge make getting followers easier. Google Plus brings you instant community + audience – two things any blogger wants more of. Make sure to share publicly if you want to build any sort of following.

7.      Wix

Wix is a cloub-based web development platform whose brand name stresses originality, simplicity and above all, free. For this reason the platform is popular among musicians, photographers, entrepreneurs and other small business owners who want a quick-fix website on a very low budget. The catch with Wix is the premium features, which of course cost money, which you’ll almost definitely need as you expand your website. The main difference here between a Wix and a WordPress is with Wix you enter for free and pay more as you go, and with WordPress you enter for a cost (domain name and hosting) and afterwards all resources are free.

8.      Medium

Probably won’t reach the development status of WordPress.org but definitely chomping at the heels of Blogger, Tumblr and even Twitter as it borrows several of their services, like topic searches and nostalgic photo shares from the founders themselves.

9.      Hubpages:

Hubpages started as an article network, the kind of place where you were rewarded for publishing lots of articles on any one topic like cooking, travel or home-improvement. Today, it boasts millions of informative articles and guides. However, a by-product of mass publishing is slightly lesser quality. You may find articles at Hubpages you’d wonder why anyone would ever publish. Or, you may find the best home for your blogging and writing needs.

10.  Joomla

Joomla is an advanced CMS used by developers to publish some of the websites we visits each day. Written in PHP, it uses many of the same structures as a WordPress site does. For whatever reason, developers have flocked elsewhere, but Joomla remains one of the web’s oldest and savviest places to run a blog or website.

FROM Website Builder

1.      Wix.com

Wix features hundreds of unique and very professional-looking  templates that can easily be      customized to keep your blog unique and different from everyone else’s. You can also add apps onto your site as well as an online store and your links to your social media accounts.

2.      Web.com

This is a great platform to use if you’re looking to create more of a professional environment for your readers. You can drag and drop elements around your site for the ultimate customized page. The site also featured an ecommerce feature—great if you’re trying to sell a product.

3.      Strikingly

All sites come with analytics built-in. See who's been visiting with easy-to-read charts. Sell products on your site with full e-commerce functionality! Strikingly never charges a transaction fee. Keep your visitors updated with our super easy blogging. Each blog post gets its own page. Galleries, video backgrounds, media sliders, custom colors, password protection. It's all integrated into our slick, modern designs and our intuitive editor.

4.      Weebly.com

Weebly features tons of unique and modern themes to start you blog off looking fresh. It also offers ecommerce, an iPhone app for posting on the go, and easy linking to your social media. This site is surely dummy-free and makes it as easy as possible for you to dive right into the blogging scene.

5.      eHost.com

Affordable hosting plan: with the current 50% discount, for only $2.75 monthly, you will get a hosting plan that includes all the necessary features that is needed to start and run a successful small website. Drag & Drop site builder: this tool is perfect for newbies, who are looking to build a website, but have no experience though. The site builder allows you to quickly create a custom webpage, publish content, upload images, create slideshows and galleries, create a contact form and publish it online, without the need of writing a single line of code.

6.      SiteBuilder.com

Includes 380+ customizable templates for business and hobby uses. Easily change any template to create the site you want. Drag-and-drop tools make it easy to add new pages, change layouts, switch colors, edit text, and more — on the fly. Full-featured software runs offline, on your PC.

7.      Site123

It is a perfect solution for a private or a corporate Internet user, offering tools that would spare you of any prior design and coding experience and let you handle it without hiring a professional.The advanced wizard with its ready-made styles and layouts will teach you how to make a website and help you set up perfect online presence with practically no effort. Upload your quality content, while we are taking care of all the rest, helping you come up with a totally responsive, search-engine-optimized website, fully adapted to all kinds of devices and screen resolutions.

8.      iPage

iPage has a deep feature set with built-in tools to launch a blog, set up a store, and run a website. The aggressive upselling and multiple dashboards may make the platform a little intimidating for novice users

9.      SimpleSite.com

SimpleSite is a Denmark-based company that offers a well-rounded website builder with free and paid plans. SimpleSite’s brand promise is to provide a platform that makes it easy for individuals of any experience level to create a great-looking website in less than 3 minutes. And thanks to the streamlined SimpleSite sign-up process, it’s actually possible to do just that.

10.   Im Creator

Creating a website with XPRS or IM Creator is easy, fast and intuitive. Anyone can create a website in a matter of minutes. Any content you'll add is responsive-by-nature and will naturally adjust itself to any device: Laptops, Tablets, Mobile-phones & even google glass and smart-watches. You can build a one-pager, or 1000-pager. Our system can support the largest news websites as well as the smallest portfolio. You have no limits on your growth. Our templates are designed by experienced, well known designers and ought to leave an impression on your users. The animation effects will blow their minds.

·         The impact of ICT in the society especially education, economics, and social reforms.

It is generally believed that ICTs can empower teachers and learners, promote change and foster the development of ‘21st century skills, but data to support these beliefs are still limited. There is widespread belief that ICTs can and will empower teachers and learners, transforming teaching and learning processes from being highly teacher-dominated to student-centered, and that this transformation will result in increased learning gains for students, creating and allowing for opportunities for learners to develop their creativity, problem-solving abilities, informational reasoning skills, communication skills, and other higher-order thinking skills. However, there are currently very limited, unequivocally compelling data to support this belief.

The spread of ICT promoted the development of information society, where economic success and social development became more dependent on the availability and accessibility of information and technology. Furthermore, ICT altered fundamental methodologies of doing activities and gave rise to e-services in communication, trade, employment, education, government, and health.

Recently we witnessed the increase of social media and mobile devices usage as they facilitate the interaction between citizens and their participation in decision-making processes. Today with the rise of knowledge societies and knowledge-based economies, the focus falls on value-added products and processes, placing more demands on ICT development, industry and government.

·         The current state of ICT in the Philippines and at least 3 member state of South East Asia

 The ITU showed that in 2013, the Philippines practically maintained its rank (103^rd place from 102^nd in 2012) despite advances in the areas of access and use of ICT. The country’s ICT connectivity was further improved through the installation of the Boracay-Palawan Submarine Cable System completed in the second quarter of 2013.

Of the 10 members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, the Philippines consistently ranked 6^th since 2010, trailing behind Singapore, Brunei Darussalam, Malaysia, Thailand and Vietnam

Telephone density, measured as the number of fixed telephone subscriptions per 100 inhabitants, has been practically similar in the Philippines, i.e., from 3.74 out of 100 persons in 2011 to 3.61 and 3.2 in 2012 and 2013, respectively.  This placed the country only ahead of Myanmar and Cambodia.

In 2012, the number of cellular mobile telephone subscriptions surpassed the total number of persons in the Philippines. There were around 105 mobile cellular telephone subscriptions for every 100 population in 2012, with mobile penetration remaining practically similar at 104 in 2013.

Cambodia, Indonesia and Malaysia are one the member states of South East Asia.

RESULTS

                        There are lots of blogging sites that are created. Most of them are created to express our opinions, feelings, point of views and ideas. Blogging sites are made to let anyone express not to impress. Some of these blogging sites allow a blogger to choose whether his posts are shared to the public or not. Though they all have the same purposes, they differ from their features. Some is very formal and for professionals, some is user-friendly and can be easily use, and some is for creative people. Some blogging sites are made for specific reasons and people.  Because of the different features they offer, it allows a blogger to choose whatever blogging site that will suit their style and taste.

CONCLUSSION AND RECOMMENDATION

Among all the given blogging sites about we would  like to recommend , WordPress.com. It is a free blog-hosting site with roughly half the features of .org. We can use it to write posts, try a free theme, set up social media buttons and learn blogging at WordPress.com. WordPress combines simplicity for users and publishers with under-the-hood complexity for developers. This makes it flexible while still being easy-to-use. You are also free to do whatever you like with the WordPress code, extend it or modify in any way or use it for commercial projects without any licensing fees. That is the beauty of free software, free refers not only to price but also the freedom to have complete control over it.  Word Press has a lot of features that we can that is high end than the other blogging sites. Flexibility with Word Press, You can make your website beautiful with themes, and extend it with plugins. You can even build your very own application. WordPress’s comment tools give you everything you need to be a forum for discussion and to moderate that discussion. WordPress is available in more than 70 languages, we can use different languages in order to make or use this website. You can be WordPress too! Help to build WordPress, answer questions on the support forums, write documentation, translate WordPress into your language, speak at a WordCamp, write about WordPress on your blog. Whatever your skill, we’d love to have you! 

RESOURCES

http://stylecaster.com/best-free-blog-sites/

http://www.dearblogger.org/blogger-or-wordpress-better

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_and_communications_technology 

http://isper.escwa.un.org/FocusAreas/ImpactofICTonsocioeconomicdevelopment/tabid/273/language/en-US/Default.aspx

 http://www.infodev.org/articles/impact-icts-learning-achievement

http://www.rappler.com/thought-leaders/90584-ict-statistics-philippines

http://stylecaster.com/best-free-blog-sites/

http://www.dearblogger.org/blogger-or-wordpress-better

http://www.top10bestwebsitebuilders.com/