Category: Uncategorized

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

When I sat down today to do my review, the title of the blog I was going to delve into gave me an unsure feeling about what I was going to be reading. “Flirty Kitty” conjured up visions of the stereotypical flighty high school girl who was going to prattle on about her latest crush, her clothes, her clique of friends, and other things that I wouldn’t be able to identify with at all.

Boy, was I wrong

When I opened the page, my preconceived notions were automatically voided by the header, “The Misadventures Of Erotic Writer Tara Alton”. My interest was automatically piqued and I jumped into the blog with both feet.

The blog layout is the standard blogger template which, honestly, isn’t important to me at all if the content of the weblog is great – which this one is. The fact that a ganeric blogger template is used quickly becomes a null and void fact once you start reading.

The blog is written by the afore-mentioned “Tara Alton”, a fascinating woman from Michigan who is an erotic writer by night and a corporate travel agent by day. She tells hilarious tales of her daily life and she literally had me laughing out loud at points. She has the incredible talent of making even the most mundane of events entertaining, and it’s a skill too often lost on many bloggers.

She talks about her workplace, with co-workers like Crazy Jane (whose sole goal in life is to own a hot-dog cart). She talks about her pets – who with names like Miss Smarty Pants and Fiona take on a life seemingly all their own. She talks about her erotic writing (which can be sampled from a link on her page… which, incidentally, is great). She talks about her incredible crush on, of all things, a cupcake. She talks of and shows pictures of her Barbie collection doing things and having the life she only dreams of. This, and so much more, is what makes up the charming and ever-so-quirky personality of the author. Maybe it is because of my own eccentricities, but I immediately connected with this author and found myself ridiculously disappointed when I came to the last of her entries.

I found the blog to be an immensely entertaining and engrossing read, and it’s actually going to make it to my personal list of frequently visited sites. My hat’s off to the author for an exceptional read and you have now garnered yourself a loyal fan. It is for this reason, I give Flirty Kitty my first perfect 5/5.Flirty Kitty

Huh. WageSlave is a pretty busy three column PHP-Nuke site full of the highs and lows of work. I’m sure everyone has a story or two. This is where some of them have ended up.

I sighed early when I tried to access ‘older articles’ on the site and instead was given an article ‘search’ feature. What if I don’t know the title and simply want to browse the older articles? I think that link was labeled wrong. I later found what I was looking for under the stories archive link instead. Phew.

The concept of wageslave.net is interesting. Anyone can contribute their stories of workplace joy and misery. The website has a few regular contributors and is seeking more writers. I enjoyed the stories. Human nature is a curious thing. I think the insider stories from ‘work’ clearly reveal many examples of this. Since you can post anonymously you get some real truth here, such as in the entry entitled ‘To my crap coworker’: ‘To my coworker who thinks it’s ok to talk about your dislike for (blacks, gays, pizza delivery people, etc.) at company functions, you need to get a life, stop drinking on the job and take a diversity class! ‘ Other site features include ‘Ask the Bitchy Assistant’ which only has a few entries but has great potential. The site while busy in appearance only has a few months worth of content. If this site starts getting a lot of traffic it could end up with a wonderful collection of stories.

A great idea for a site. Well worth a bookmark. Hopefully the word will get out about this site so it can develop a rich archive and a diverse collection of work related stories. I’m sure many people would be interested in reading them.
WageSlave

mcphee, author of this blog, and who insists on no capitilisation on that, is a role-playing, football obsessed, geek, and describes himself as such in his first post. The blog is pretty personal, and seems mostly aimed towards friends in the earlier archives, and not what I would describe as particularly geeky. REAL geeks would say they’re a nerd, naturally, and would also have that whole robots.txt deal down pat.

There wasn’t much in the way of terribly interesting subjects to grab me in the archives, and it lacked a certain sparkle. There are cartoons posted on a regular basis made by mcphee featuring humourous conversations between a pair of monkeys, but even this didn’t particularly encourage me, and not enough to return to read it again, I’m afraid. Not even the post regarding Mike Reid, either, sorry, and I do agree he’s a git!

The layout itself isn’t particularly practical, more posts to a page would have been ideal, as there are currently 29 pages of archives to trawl through, and no quick way round it either – although the entire collection of monkey cartoons are available seperately by clicking their image in the header.

I think this blog could benefit from a few minor changes to the layout, as mentioned previously, and I understand that the content may be interesting to similarly minded persons, but it just didn’t inspire me at all. I will indeed be returning less than daily.

Less Than Daily

My first thought when viewing this blog was, “Here we go again, another right wing political blogger!” A quick scan of this blog would bring me the now infamous “Red & Blue States Map,” and several Bush/Cheney graphics. The posts are contained in a simple Blogger template. The fonts and layout was easy to read, a few customizations, and lots of right wing links. Being a neutral reviewer I promised myself to act like Switzerland when reviewing this blog.

Leaning Right lists itself as a News/Links blog and that is very much what it is. Tony Mc, the author, only writes about 25% of the content of the blog. Much of that is him saying “Have a Right Day,” when signing off on his posts. I followed several political blogs this election season and Leaning Right is a carbon copy of so many of them already out there. It seems as though the author just regurgitates news stories that he read though out the day onto his blog. He does do a few commentaries on comments he receives or articles he read in which it was nice to read his personal opinions. I am always interested on what makes someone Right or Left. Who isn’t?

For someone who seems to be new to blogging Tony has all the basics covered. An easy to read template, a guestbook, and a counter are the first steps to creating any good blog. Unfortunately for right now at least Tony’s blog is just that, good. Due to the fact that there are just so many political blogs one has to do something different or original to make their blog great. To make his blog stand out Tony could tweak his template a bit, get more personal and not rely so much on links. He needs to attempt to find a nitch that hasn’t yet been found in the world of political blogs. However, if Tony simply wants to share the stories he finds interesting with his readers and sometimes make a comment on them he is doing that just fine.

Leaning Right is the same old same old when it comes to a blog on someone’s personal political agenda. It is very much, “this is how I feel so you should too.” If you like politics and you were for Bush in the 2004 election this blog may be for you. The only problem is that everything written, linked to, or reposted is probably something that you have seen before somewhere else. Tony Mc is getting the word out. He is blogging about his views and other online information that reflect his views or prove why the rest of the world should have his views. The problem is that an old brown sweater will always be an old brown sweater. Sure it’s comfortable and we wear it all the time, but after awhile it just sort of blends in with all the other brown sweaters. If Tony wants more readers he is going to have to sprinkle some glitter on both the right and left sleeves of that old brown sweater. If it stays the same it will just fade into the blog graveyard.

Leaning Right