Blog Analysis-Logan Nielsen- January 18, 2017

1.      I think the audience that this is intended for is young adults to middle aged people. People with some form of post-secondary education, and occupations could be a wide field. It’s definitely for people who read blogs and post commonly. While it’s not always the case, people with more education tend to read more. The occupations could involve keeping up with current events and seeing what’s going on in the world.

2.      In the blog post, ‘Because Reading is Fundamental,’ Jeff Attwood is trying to say that it’s become a common occurrence online for people to skip the bulk of information and skip right to posting incomplete information. He believes there should be a greater emphasis on listening, in this form reading, to better enrich the conversations of the online community. He gives examples to this affect and gives suggestions on how to improve the problem.

3.      The piece opens by giving an example of a blogger with a number of their post counts beside them. Attwood talks about how dangerous it can be attaching numbers to people, and how it can mistakenly come to define them. It does a good job of drawing in the reader, and establishes the idea of people online sometimes ignoring the facts in order to be heard. The main argument for the piece is that most people don’t read articles all the way through, but still post about it. This gives a watered down conversation between people online, and there should be more listening involved. He gives examples like the, ‘Ars Banana Experiment,’ where people are supposed to write bananas in their comment if they read that particular line, on paragraph 7 in the post. The 90^th commenter did this. Attwood’s examples to improve this are: timing people’s read time, remove interruptions, rewards for reading, and real time updates. It’s tied well together by stating his argument, giving examples of the problem, and offering solutions.