The Weblog Review

Since it’s been ages since I’ve read any new blogs so I have to say it was fun to read a new site, however, I was wishing for something a bit more original.

Kinipela.org is hosted and ran by Jenn, a 21-year-old woman living “an average life” as she puts it. She’s married, has a dog and is currently going to college. She mostly just talks about her family, husband and school. I did like the few personal entries she had regarding some news about pregnancy and another post about how it’s important to not argue about every little thing that ticks you off about your partner. Over all the posts were so-so. I think I would like it if she engaged me more in her posts so I could get an idea who Jenn is and relate to her. I don’t really feel like I really know who she is.

The site’s default look currently is black with large, white snowflakes, in season with the time of year it is currently. Felt a bit too dark for me, so I changed it to a purple, winter theme because it was easier on my eyes. Her site’s fairly easy to get around which is always a plus for any type of site. I wish though her archives were organized by month, rather than having to click on the link “previous entries” to get older posts.

Kinipela.org doesn’t really differ from a lot of blogs out there on the internet. I think the only draw to this was maybe those few personal posts, but that’s about it. It’s an average site about a girl with “an average life.”
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I must admit I was rather surprised when I saw the title and then compared it to the site. “George’s Employment Blawg”. The title certainly lacks creativity and the first thing that popped into my head was that the site was about a man called George who was going to report on his rather menial job using phrases such as “Fo shizzle” and the like! Thankfully the end result turned out to be one of the most expertly written blogs I have ever encountered!

Georges Employment Blawg (a play on the word “blog” to include the word “law”) covers topics related to the area of employment and is a collaboration between three professionals; George (the founder of the “blawg”), Michael Harris and Catherine Collingwood who happens to be the designer of the site. In my opinion she hasn’t done a bad job of it. The colour scheme works well and while there are Google Ad’s present, they are placed in a position where they don’t get in the way of you reading the content.

The content itself is (as I’ve said earlier) related to everything employment but slanted more towards the legal aspects in it’s case studies. It also reports findings from other sites which almost makes it an essential portal for existing lawyers and wannabe lawyers. Now the word “lawyer” may scare away the average Joe Soap who may be expecting to be bombarded with a load of legal mumbo-jumbo but surprisingly this isn’t the case and everything is explained in an easy to follow manner.

If you are part of the workforce and are interested in the implications of lawsuits amongst other companies/corporations then I would highly recommend this blog. If you do happen to be unemployed then I would still recommend the blog for it’s incredible insights!NULL

My first thought about this weblog? Someone just bought a good chunk of stock in Plantronics and needs to the price to shoot up through the roof if they plan on making any profit. With as many Google Ads that can be found on this site, it might just be possible. Even after reading the entire three months of archives, I still have no idea who is writing this weblog or the purpose behind it – other than make a few quick bucks.

I’m a diehard Firefox user. When I loaded this site in my favorite browser, I was met with what was obviously a style sheet made specifically for Internet Explorer. For other Firefox users that happen upon this site, they’ll see just a white background with white text, in a layout that seems somewhat broken. Don’t worry, though – the Google and Amazon ads are still there.

Once I finally loaded the site in IE, it was a little more pleasing to the eye using different blues and grays in the design. The site easy to navigate and the archives are listed both by date and by category, which makes locating different items easy.

Pop-up ads used to be my major annoyance while surfing the Internet. Thanks to pop-up blockers, I’m able to almost completely avoid these. Now, the latest craze of advertising happens to be affiliate ads – Google, Amazon, etc. This site over does it. There are three locations on each page where readers are subjected to keyword ads. In addition, the posts where the author reviews different products contains a link to Amazon, which the author makes money off of every time readers order the product by clicking the link.

The posts contain exactly what the title of this weblog indicates. They are all full of “Plantronics and Wireless Headsets Information”. The author includes reviews of products recently hitting the market, news about the latest technologies that are in development stages, and actual information or definitions about the terms and products the author frequently mentions.

It’s very clear throughout each entry that the author is preying on people searching through Google. The latest post uses the phrase “best price for nextel i95 phone bluetooth” SIX times in a post that’s only three small paragraphs long. If that doesn’t indicate that this site is only in the business of trolling for hits, I don’t know what is.

While I can certainly appreciate an entrepenurial spirit, it grows tired when trying to pass it off as a blog. This site would be better considered as a review-oriented or informational site. A site like that would perhaps be better suited for as many ads as this author chooses to include. It’s not a site most people will bookmark as something they want to visit again and again. It’s an informational site that will only be useful to those people looking for “Plantronics and Wireless Headsets Information”. Everyone else will, without a doubt, skip right onto the next weblog.
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Before I even started to read The Muttering Muse, I was already enamored by the site. It’s a layout recently created by the author. While it is the traditional two-column layout, it doesn’t match any of the over-replicated templates that are floating around the weblog world. The creativity the author shows in just her layout made me a happy camper. She also includes links to different portions of her site. This isn’t done nearly enough anymore, and it’s because everyone’s become so dependent on the generic templates that are available to them.

Who is The Muttering Muse? She goes by Kestrel, which is explained in the “About” section of her site. In the brief bio she includes on the main page of the site, readers can learn the basics about her. She’s a 25-year-old married grad student living in New England with her husband and dog.

The site’s pulled me in with its design and given me enough information about the author that I don’t feel like I have to dig for information about the person writing every day. Color me impressed.

The Muttering Muse has archives dated back to April 7th, 2004, but at the top of this entry, referring to the movie The Passion of the Christ, it was originally posted on the author’s old blog. I should have known from the get-go that this weblog didn’t exactly belong to someone who’d just picked up very recently. I just wish the additional archives were accessible somewhere for hooked readers like myself!

As aspect that turns a weblog from good to great, in my opinion, is how a writer/Blogger relates to potential readers. This author has no problem reaching out to a wide variety of people. She writes about her dog Oreo – being a new dog owner, I completely relate to the stories of the pooch, and I feel like many other pet people will do the same. The author is currently finishing graduate school and obviously mentions her trials and tribulations and she works towards her final thesis. These posts clearly reach out to other people going through the same thing. All of her posts that I read are like this. It’s refreshing to read a site with this much clarity, instead of one that random readers may be completely lost while reading. An average reader can jump right into the middle of The Muttering Muse’s archives and not be too terribly lost at all.

In addition to very well-written summaries of her days in general, the author also does a bang up job of breaking up the monotony of stereotypical “this is what I did today” posts. On a regular basis, you can find recipes, complete with pictures of the finished product. The author also consistently creates her own memes, giving her readers a chance to not only learn more about her, but also participate in the comments part of the site.

As I mentioned earlier, the design of the site is a uniquely done layout, designed by the author. She uses a few shades of brown in the two-column layout. The site is very easy to read with the colors chosen, and it is also easy to navigate. She lists autobiographical information, links that she reads on a regular basis,

I didn’t read through all 245 entries that the site stats listed in the sidebar have counted before writing this review. However, now that this review has been submitted, I may go back and read all of the archives on my own time. The Muttering Muse is definitely a site worth exploring.
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When I first got to fBlog, I noticed that it didn’t look like a conventional blog and looked more akin to a giant content management system. The blog seems to have been established since May of last year, however trying to access the posts during this period was challenge that I eventually succumbed to because of the poorly designed Archive system.

The blogger himself doesn’t really give away much information about himself. Sure, we know that his favourite colour is orange and that he likes bands such as Bowling For Soup but there’s very little personal information divulged and I had to resort to using my detective skills to unveil his first name from his email address. We also don’t know where he’s from. Initially I thought America, because he used the grade system when referring to school but then I noticed that he likes Cricket, a sport that would be unheard of in the US so I’m guessing he lives in a country that’s a dominion of Great Britain, maybe Australia?

What struck me as being particularly strange was that this blog has very short posts. This maybe intentional to prevent people from being bored by long, in depth posts. However, as an over-analytic, it had the opposite effect on me and I soon found myself to be viewing a tonne of posts that were lacking creativity, personality and intellect. Don’t get me wrong, some posts are indeed long, but they too bored me! Maybe I’m just hard to please or maybe this blogger hasn’t quite honed his writing style yet. It’s not all bad though. Some posts were interesting and very thought-provoking (such as his post on Friend-ism) but the majority of the blogs here seem to be just the blogger reporting on his daily life in a not so personal style. This means that as an outsider I have a fairly good idea of whats going on so the blog isn’t just confined to those who personally know the blogger.

As I said earlier, the site appears to look more like a CMS that you’d see on a Tech news site for example and not a blog! Maybe that’s because there’s a lot of extra features down the sidebar. On most other blogs you’d expect to see links to the archives, maybe a profile and a few buttons and not much else. On this site however, you’re treated to a whiteboard, buttons, a hit map, a poll, a chatterbox, a friends list, blog information, links, an image gallery and a calender which makes the word “overkill” spring to mind.

Now it may appear that I’ve been very pessimistic towards this blog throughout the review but that’s just because I find with Personal blogs that you either fall for them straight-away or just can’t get yourself around them. This, for me, was the latter! However not everyone feels this way because of the presence of a small community that regularly comments on the posts which is something I just didn’t feel compelled to do.
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