Author: admin

Tale of a Baby Human opens to a line of photos in the header that range from an ultrasound, to a picture of our little celebrity at five months old. Under this is a green caterpillar that shows his age also. The entries have a pale yellow background and are crisp and clean to read.

But what steals the show on this blog is the multimedia section that rises this Mommy blog to a whole new level. There’s a song composed by the grandfather before the baby was born, and slide shows of ultrasounds, along with ones of the baby on the day of delivery and they continue to the present. The windows media presentations include some very well chosen soundtracks that will have you laughing or if you have children of your own, tearing up. ( Those of you who don’t have children yet may not have this reaction. And you probably think the rest of us dolts. But believe me when you do, you will understand that parents can go a little whacko about their kids. It’s our job. 🙂

The written entries begin when our Mommy finds out she is pregnant and they document the whole process in a personal and humorous way that is fun to follow. I began to see also how this blog must have been a great way for friends and family to keep up to date on the latest news.

There are the usual links to other Mommy blogs and other web sites of interest to the new mother and child. And the author seems to have a fair number of regularly commenting readers. Which is a good sign that you are writing well enough to keep people’s interest.

The obvious target audience is Mommies. But don’t let that stop you from checking out the multimedia section of this blog, even if you are not in your child bearing years just yet. I think you will get a chuckle out of the one entitled “Practice Makes Perfect”. Though I have to admit, I watched every one of them.

Go on, have a little fun. I did!

Tale of a Baby Human

Upon entering this blog, the first thing I saw at the very top of the page, was a row of baby photo’s,(including 2 of before the baby was born).

At that time, my first impression was that this blog may be of real interest, especially in a female perspective.

I looked in the top right hand corner and there was a brief description of what the blog was mainly about. It said:
… a blog about a journey through pregnancy, birth and life with a baby…

It’s always nice to see a description of some kind about the blogs contents. It gives readers a better perspective on things.

Erin (the author) is a 27 year old “stay at home wife and mother”, and also an ex writer for an advertising agency. At the moment she is loving every minute of staying at home caring for her baby. Her blog is devoted basically on her baby (Benjamin). She writes about his feeding periods, his sleeping habits etc. Being a mom myself, reading her entries brought a smile to my face . One of the reasons being that it brought back some fond memories of my own.

Erin started her blog in January 2003. Practically every post (except for maybe 1 or 2), is focused entirely on Benjamin. Erin has links as well posted on several of her entries which contain sites on parenting . Very helpful sites to new moms especially.

Erin has links on her entries as well, where you can actually hear Benjamin making baby sounds.

On the right hand side , Erin has several links arranging from Benjamin’s ultrasound photos, Erin’s pregnancy pics and even little home movies of Benjamin, (which were very cute indeed) There are also several adorable photos of Benjamin located throughout the blog.

Anyone can see that Benjamin is Erin’s pride and joy. Her entries are very well written and very easy to read. However, I wasn’t too fond of the colors on the page. But since the blog was about a baby, the colors suited it quite well. This would be a great site for an expectant mother to visit. It would give her a few insights on parenthood. No offense to the male population, but it would be good for them to visit as well. One of the reasons being that maybe they would get more of a perspective and insight on the female and childbirth.

There was a problem I had with the links on the right hand side. Every time I clicked on one, it wouldn’t let me go back to the previous page. It continued to knock me off of the blog completely.

In conclusion, I do recommend giving this blog a visit. It is quite interesting and informative. As I already stated, the links kept knocking me off the site. Well now that Erin knows about that problem, I am sure she will have it fixed in the near future.Tale of a Baby Human

A self-proclaimed “non-blog,” Waveflux is actually an online journal, so it declares itself in its very first post. The author is not identified but lives in St. Louis, is married, works for a non-profit, and definitely does not like George W. Bush. And boy, he knows how to make you laugh. And think. And do all the things that the world of blogs—-er, online journals is supposed to be about.

There are no links for comments on Waveflux, for it does not “willingly collaborate.” It’s just this guy’s opinions, take them or leave them. Oh, and also photos of his cats. (People with cats always put pictures of their cats on their websites, don’t they?) The site’s design is a movable type platform, very clean and unassuming, just like the author himself. (Well, okay, I don’t know how clean he is. We should ask his wife on that.)

He has tons of links on what he’s talking about (red links! Argh. Not a fan of the red type, Wave), so you know he’s doing his homework and not just some shmo spouting off crap he heard on talk radio. His posts are all categorized neatly in one of the 3 columns, and one category is devoted to The Amazing Race. Ya gotta love that.

So, so many of his posts made me laugh. Including the title of one from April 2004 “Please, God, end it now” with a photo of William Hung (bad American Idol singer) underneath. The Tyra Banks post (08/06/04) was hysterical. The political posts are smart and insightful as were the posts on pop culture, sex and gender, and even who he is currently crushin’ on. I especially like the conversations he has with his wife. What an entertaining house that must be!

In short, I will spend the next several hours reading each and every one of his entries again. I will bookmark this site and read it every day. And it doesn’t hurt that he does look like Andre Braugher.
Waveflux

Jamesyboy has a blog named “The Future’s Bright……” and it’s busier than a busy freeway, something you see on television like, say, in Los Angeles.

Upon coming to the site, you have no idea what’s going on. What do I do? Where do I look? Look at all this stuff! There are links and photos and video links and forums and news feeds and more links and thumbnail photos of friends and blogrolls, blog rings, whew, I’m exhausted just relaying it all to you. The blog must scroll down a half a mile with all this stuff, stuff, STUFF! Jamesyboy has included a link (and/or photo) of everything he’s ever encountered in his life. Thank God he was born in 1978, otherwise there would only be more links. (I kid.) There’s a nice smiling photo of Jamesyboy in the upper left corner, so I started there.

Jamesyboy is from Reading, England. He likes music and posts some really cool music videos on his site. In fact, from what I could tell, his very first 2 posts from August 2003 were just that–video clips. I suppose they were clips he liked at the time. I quite enjoyed them as well. Recently, he’s given all his posts the name of the So-and-So Experience, as in “The GMail Experience” or “The Improving Fitness Experience.” You learn about his day to day life, commuting to and from work, his friends, their weddings and what it’s like to be Jamesyboy in Reading. While not earth-shattering by any means, I love to get slices of life such as this. And, yes, I suppose all the hundreds of thousands (I exaggerate for effect) of links he has up and down both sides of his blog ARE part of who he is.

Now if Jamesyboy would only ditch about three-fourths of the links/photos on his page, we could find his archives and read about him more thoroughly. I give his site a 2. Lose the clutter, gain a reader!
The Future’s Bright

Mondo Irlando is an odd site, to say the least and full of contradictions. When I first entered it, I was hit by a site that was busy. A flashing Amazon sign was the first thing I noticed, (and much use is made of the Amazon referrals scheme throughout the rest of the site too) followed by some rather basic links and title bars. Lots of reds and greens on a background that is made up of the numbers 1 – 9 sprawled across the screen. I was also a little confused as to where the blog was, being confronted with three main titles – “film”, “music” and “other shit”. I had a bit of a root around though and settled on the “Article Archive”, which seemed as good a place as any to start reading.

Now, firstly I am going to completely slate this blog. You have been warned. But before I dive headlong in to the vitriol, I also want to say that there is light of the end of the tunnel – this blog is not all bad. Just mostly. Firstly, the writing style.

The thing which bothered me the most about the blog is the amount of unnecessary swearing. Not just casual swearing either – it is pretty blatant and pretty full on throughout the blog. For example, one post is titled “The motherfucking cinema of Woody Allen”. Now don’t get me wrong, I am all for swearing. Swearing is big and it is clever, but I really think it works so much better when it is used APPROPRIATELY and not just for its own sake. That title, for example would have worked so much better without the m-word included – it did not improve it in any way. The same principle applies to the rest of the blog too – it is absolutely full of superfluous swearing. Far from being impressed, it quite frankly just made me feel ill. The rest of the writing style is not much better. It is very pretentious and full of grammatical errors. It wouldn’t be so bad but the errors are generally put in intentionally to try and sound cool, or authentic, or something. I know we all like to add our own “voice” or idiom to our weblogs but this goes way too far. It just sounds forced, is difficult to read and occasionally doesn’t even make sense. The author also likes to include his own made-up imagery and metaphors, but he is no Shakespeare in this regard either. He also talks about himself in the third person, similar to the way Craig David does. By now, you may have picked up that I didn’t enjoy reading it.

Ok, rant over. The sad fact of the matter is that once you get past the appalling writing style, the dubious site design and the jarring profanities, there are actually some interesting, well researched articles to be found. They are mostly along the lines of popular culture (music/ films/ books/ computer games) but they are often extensive and full of information about each subject. The musical references and album reviews clearly show an in-depth knowledge of the subject and he even offers MP3’s to download. He is also not afraid to interview people about areas he likes to investigate further- book authors or filmmakers for example. This would all be very impressive if it wasn’t posted on to his site in that “unique” style, which tends to spoil it rather a lot.

So whilst the score of 2 is low overall, the actual content is actually quite good in places. It is just the whole package and form it is wrapped up in which I intensely dislike. If the author chose to write like an adult instead of a 13 year old teenager, I would probably come back more often.Mondo Irlando