Month: January 1970

Upon entering Will’s Delirium, I am greeted with the startling whispered message: “It’s gonna be okay” I sure hope he’s telling the truth! There is a black background with a stylized graphic of our author. The newest entry is displayed to the right. And there is virtually nothing else on this page. No links, no frills, no errors… well, we’ll see about the errors later. The only other thing on the page is a cryptic countdown to “Freedom”. 53 days and counting at the time of my review. This blog is the epitome of minimalism. A Zen kind of blog if you will.

I began to read the entries beginning with the present. And what emerged as I continued was a deeply introspective young man of a philosophical bent. His entries are intensely honest and very personal. He asks himself big questions and sometimes arrives at answers, but just as often does not. Frankly, this is the closest thing to a truly personal and private journal that I have thus far read for Weblog Review. These entries are more like the things I write in my really real journal, not my blog. In this respect our author is particularly interesting to me.

The writing style is clear and understandable. No obtuse references to nebulous things here. There is no “About Me” page, I found by reading that the author is in college and also works. But these aspects of himself are kept way in the background in the entries I read.
I would have read more but the rather awkward navigation began to get tedious, and finally started to balk. When I clicked on an archive date, the screen went white and it took up to a minute to reload the archive list. After about the 12th time trying to get back there, I gave it up.

The archives go back to February of 2001. That is quite a body of work. I would suggest an easier navigation function for those interested in reading more than just the most recent posts. In the older archived entries there are many graphics that no longer work, which may or may not matter to the content of the entry. I just mention it because there were so many of them.

I might check back in with this blog from time to time, to see how the author is doing in finding answers to Life the Universe and Everything. He certainly is asking all the hard questions.

Will’s Delirium

I’m not usually fond of the darker colored sites, but this one is readable, at least for a short while. After spending a large amount of time on the site, the white on black letters seem to run together in a blur. The color scheme, however, works well together and the pictures add a touch of brightness to the dreary black background. Based on my first impression, I didn’t expect to find much more than exaggerated gossip concerning the stars of our Hollywood world and the other characters that grace our tabloid pages.

Unfortunately, I was all too correct on my assumption. This blog, while it serves its own purpose, is little more than a rehashing of the events going on in the lives of those people most of us will never chance to meet. Unlike your “typical” fellow bloggers who are separated from us by distance, this blog focuses on those individuals out of reach due to wealth, fame, and star quality. We’re talking the cream of the crop here, folks.

The short version is this: the author (or authors) take the daily garbage and re-word it into nothing any more spectacular than it was the first thirty times we heard the same gossip over the radio, on television, and in the tabloids. The re-wording is ever so slight. I hesitate to say there’s any “cut and pasting” going on, but there might as well be. There is very, very little commentary thrown in, but there is SOME. However, the commentary also reads like reheated verbiage.

Unlike most “news blogs” there is no linking to anything supporting what is posted, but there really is no need since we can verify the “stories” by merely turning on our television or radio. This blog hasn’t been around long, but the links mostly work and everything is clean. There are two links to the author’s sites, however, one is broken.

Steve and Tiffany (broken link) are both listed as contributors and seem to share the burden of posting equally for the most part. There are a few less posts by Steve and Tiffany is certainly wordier with her entries. However, it is very difficult to get any sense of personality or humor regarding either of them due to the type of writing they engage in for this site.

I may have been a bit harsh in this review, but news blogs of this type aren’t anything special. There is nothing that makes this blog stand out from any other of its type. It’s good for a one-stop shop for all your gossiping needs, but I would hope the world has better things to do than keep up on this type of “news”. And I use the word “news” loosely.
Scandal Snoops

This is a nice looking weblog with some celebrity gossip in it. The archives don’t work but are handy if you want to see what their template HTML looks like. On the other hand, the weblog has only been going three weeks anyway, so all the archives fit on to the main page.

The Blog’s URL is a subdomain of something to do with Ebay. It seemed entirely unrelated to the blog so I didn’t pursue the main site very much, but my guess is, there’s money to be made for the site owners somewhere along the line.

The site looks nice – it is black which I thought was quite sleek, clutter free and contains celebrity pictures throughout. The purple and blue text in the sidebar looks pretty as well. If I am going to have to read celebrity gossip, I guess a glare free site like this is as good a place as any.

I have no idea what the quality of the celebrity gossip is like because it is not something I am interested in. It seemed ok for the first three entries, then after that I got bored and just scanned the rest. Finding out that Britney Spears may have had zits wasn’t exactly the most meaningful piece of information I have acquired today. I currently have a zit on my chin at the moment and does anyone care? I don’t think so. Apparently the zits of a half-assed singer in America are more important than those of a humble weblog reviewer, which hardly seems fair.

Most of the information was relating to Hollywood stars, with a smattering of American sports stars and the occasional music or TV celebrity. To be honest, not being a fan of main stream culture (or living in America), I didn’t even know who half the celebrities were, let alone worry about whether they had been kissing someone else. The funniest entry was the first one. It lambastes Whoopi Goldberg for making sexual innuendos using President Bush’s name. Ok, you don’t have to be Einstein to make “Bush” a sexual reference, but apparently this shouldn’t be done because “This is the highest office in our land and the leader of the free world and no matter what you are to show it respect.” I guess insightful political commentary isn’t their strong point.

I guess if you like celebrity gossip, you could go out and by “Heat” magazine and be done with it (if you live in the UK that is – I am sure there are many equivalents in the US). I guess this site may have something extra to offer above and beyond the tabloid gossip columns, but I am rather doubtful in its present form.Scandal Snoops

The Brittany Spears Blabbermouth exhibits a quintessential greatness of blogging – if you’re interested in Brittany Spears, you no longer have to do a Google search and sift through pages and pages of other information to find you Brittany gossip, you can just go to the Brittany Spears Blabbermouth. The blog is basically a collection of, and comments, on anything that has been published about Brittany Spears, from official press releases and performances to paparazzi pictures and gossip. The color scheme is perfect and it even includes a list of Brittany Spears-related paraphernalia available on eBay!

The authors (Tiffany B. and Steve) get their info from all kinds of sources and the blog – appropriately, if you consider the subject – is loaded with pictures of Brittany. Though there isn’t much on the blog that moves beyond commentary about news stories I had read at regular news outlets, having a collection of the stories and commentary in one place made the reading experience similar to reading a minute-by-minute biography of Brittany and the authors are good at tying a current Brittany event to people and events in her past.

Bottom line: if you’re already a die-hard Brittany stalker, this site won’t tell you much, but if you have a passing interest in her, this is where you can catch up with the die-hard stalkers. I’ll also reiterate that it’s an excellent, if somewhat frivolous, example of the potential function of blogs in the general media world. The layout seems to be a bit screwed up at the moment, but with all the Brittany info, pics, links, and eBay stuff, the site is worth a look.
Britney Spears Blabbermouth

Britney Spears Blabbermouth is a new Britney Spears fan site. I guess the world needed another Brittney Spears fan site on the web? *Ahem* Anyway, the site is pink and pretty and hasn’t been around very long at all, as it started in July… So there isn’t a whole lot of content here, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing in my humble opinion.

Blabbermouth has many photos of a mostly scantily clad Britney along with Enquirer-esque stories. The articles by Steve and Tiffany aren’t badly written, but how engaging can a story about Britney’s clothes be? In one entry, Steve offers some commentary on Spears’ next wedding: I am amazed at how much money people spend on weddings. The sad thing is to see such an elaborate affair often lead to divorce just a few short years later.’. We agree there.

You can read all about Britney and her day to day exploits with boyfriends, *music*, her *next* wedding and the media. Personally I can’t imagine anything more pointless than following the day to day activities of the bubble headed pop princess, but to each their own. Blabbermouth has a huge eBay ‘Britney Spears’ merchandise ad at the bottom of the page which detracts from any sincerity this site may have had. I wonder if eBay sales kickbacks are somehow the real point of this site?

Other than fans of the pop princess or guys looking for naughty Spears’ photos – I don’t know who would want to visit this blog. There are other much better sites devoted to the singer on the web. Much like Britney… there isn’t a whole lot of substance here. Ironically, this Blabbermouth doesn’t have a whole lot to say.

Britney Spears Blabbermouth