Blogging Blogs v3.0

Blog #3: t shirt surgery

I've been over on the Livejournal side for a while now, before coming to Blogger for this class. LJ has communities that members can join and post to. There are communities for everything, from hobbies to music to TV. This is a community where people can post pictures of new things they've made out of old t-shirts and comment on each other's work. And it's a pretty popular community - almost 16,000 members.

Technicalities...

Filter, notebook, journal/blog?: Mostly blog, as the entries are short and consist of images and short descriptions. However, the community's userinfo page becomes part-filter by providing a list of links to websites and other LJ communities on similar topics (tutorials, stencilling, selling creations, etc).

Genre: Hobby. While some of the members sew to sell their work, all members sew for fun. It could also be classified as a personal blog, as each post showcases a personal project that shows each... person's... personality. Did I use "person" too much in that sentence? Did I totally stretch that description? Probably to both.

Purpose: Self-expression, mostly, as the point of the community is to post pictures of your work to receive feedback. A secondary purpose could be providing info, as some members will intertwine suggestions into their posts (example: saying that a material is hard to work with) or show a very basic step-by-step process of their work (this is a nifty example of a more-than-basic tutorial).

On LJ, the userinfo page is used to define your blog/journal/whatever you want to call it. Communities also use this page to set the rules for posting - stay on topic, be nice, that sort of thing. Since t-shirt surgery has many many members, the rules are also reposted on the blog's main page. This could make the blog and its moderators seem stuffy, but at the same time, I still see people blatantly breaking the rules on a semi-regular basis - and I've been watching this blog occasionally (and wishing I could sew like that) for a year or so - so posting the rules multiple times is almost necessary.

My favorite thing about this community is seeing everyone's creativity and wide range of personalities. There are some shirts posted that I don't like (although they are sewn very well), others that I want to steal and keep for my very own, and many where I find myself thinking something like "if that shirt was a different color and had a different band I would so wear that." And that is awesome.

The end.