Category: Uncategorized

Right away, our author here lets us know that “something is serious wrong with the set up of this page”, but she does claim to be “working on it”. Hopefully that work will be complete soon, because right now, it’s a hard site to maintain focus on.

The site is split into three portions. There are two columns on the left of the screen that literally contain a little bit of everything – a tagboard, a picture of George W. Bush, a description of the author’s family, and some more random information that apparently has no other place to go but on the main page. It certainly makes for an extremely busy site, and sometimes hard to focus on.

You learn a lot about Melanie’s family just by reading through her weblog. The way she tells her story each day reminds me of the same type of conversation you’d have while sitting down with someone over coffee – it’s a very conversational way of writing, and one that makes you feel comfortable from the start.

Melanie’s battling with progressive MS, which sometimes keeps her from doing the things that she’d like to do or experiencing things that her family members are experiencing without her. Despite this, Melanie manages to keep her posts upbeat. There are issues she gets hit with quite often that I think the average Joe wouldn’t really know how to react. A neighbor and close friend is murdered and then slandered in the local newspaper, her teenage daughter decides to dabble in WICCA, her son is a struggling musician who refuses to give up on his music, and her poor dog is paralyzed – not a very enjoyable last few months for our author, but one she manages to make it through with what seems like a smile in every post.

Through all that Melanie has experienced, or at least all she’s posted in her weblog, there was a recent post that had some of the best advice in it I’ve ever seen: “Don’t EVER become complacent with your life! Don’t find yourself at a point where you are just so happy and then stop doing what you just know you are supposed to be doing to feel that way”.

Overall, this is the type of weblog that you can certainly become hooked on. That’s apparent not only from the feeling I got after leaving the site, but the number of loyal visitors that seem to leave comments on each post. It’s certainly as personal as weblogs come. If that’s the type of weblog that interests you the most, then New Oreleans Live Blog is one for you.

New Orleans Live Blog

In my humble opinion, Winnie the Pooh and friends don’t exactly mesh well with Jim Morrison – not at all. But at Steve’s Thoughtful Spot, apparently they do. Just like in the tales of Pooh and his thoughtful spot, the main logo for Steve’s Thoughtful Spot features Pooh at the top of the page. Directly underneath and to the left is a picture of Jim Morrison. Pooh and Morrison are both legendary in their own respects, so perhaps that’s the common bond there.



There’s an awesome “About Steve” section, which can be found by clicking on the link right below Jim Morrison. It’s very thorough and probably one of the more entertaining bits of biographical information I’ve read on a weblog.

Based on strictly content, this weblog is wonderful. Steve had me laughing in every single post. There’s nothing you have to “get” to understand his humor. He’s just flat-out a funny guy. He writes well, and he’s got a terrific way of throwing additional comments into his stories that make you laugh and make the anecdotes seem so real.



Steve makes you laugh with random quotes he’s chosen to put in between posts every so often. And he makes your brain work WHILE you’re laughing when he touches on topics like the dominance of the RIAA or the comparison of bodily excrements to different colors in a Crayola 64 box. It’s REALLY funny stuff here.

Steve’s humor won me over immensely with this weblog, and I have no doubt any reader’s reaction will be that of laughter and sometimes side aches and tears from laughing so hard. Definitely check this one out.

Steve’s Thoughtful Spot

When I first loaded up fallible.com, I immediately knew I was going to like this site. The design is unique – an interesting border of shapes around the actual content – and Katy has few distractions. There are some links to her writing and the archives. Nothing to draw you away from the actual blog.

Even if there was something to draw you away from this site, I don’t think it would do its job very well. Katy’s writing is incredibly detailed and insightful – you won’t want to leave. Many of her posts revolve around her family, and the detail in which she describes them is almost breathtakingly realistic. Katy manages to take utterly simple events – take for example, her husband putting the curtain the wrong way such that it spills water onto the floor – and turns them into amazingly funny, shocking, and deeply touching incidents. One of the unique things about this blog is that the author alternates between third-person and first- person. When she writes in third-person, the stories she tells are interesting enough to make you very glad that her blog goes back 3 years and has plenty of content to read.

The design of fallible.com goes along well with the content. The different shapes that make up the border of the blog are very much like the author’s writing – composed of various ideas and happenings. Some of the archives did give me installation errors at the top of the page, but the contents of that month still loaded successfully. There wasn’t much beyond the blog itself, but as stated before, you don’t really need anything else. The writing is fresh, captivating, and unique.

I highly recommend you visit fallible.com. Even if you aren’t into this type of blog – very emotionally charged – you will still enjoy reading Katy’s perceptive and engrossing posts. Fallible.com

I must say that my curiousity was definitely piqued when I saw the title for this weblog. I half-expected to be bombarded with ads and pop-ups about CD’s and video games when I loaded up the site. Much to my surprise, however, I was presented with a clean and simple front page that was pleasing to the eye.

The Mediaburn Radio Weblog is a companion to the online magazine at http://www.mediaburn.net. Consequently, the links and news on the weblog revolve around the same topics as the magazine does – namely “news, information, music, and the arts”. However, the weblog itself is primarily news and information about music and the arts, and technology. In fact, many of the news stories did focus on technology, such as the recent acquirement of blogger.com by Google. There are occasional sparse comments by the author, but the weblog is primarily a collection of links to different articles, albeit interesting articles. For example, the blog’s February 3, 2003 entry had a link to a site which tracks the national debt (which unfortunately is over 6 trillion dollars as of 2 minutes ago).

I couldn’t seem to find any information about the author, or perhaps authors, of this weblog. Gary Santoro appears to be the sole commentator of the blog and director of the magazine. I had to dig through many of the entries to find some of Gary’s comments, and I was disgruntled by the fact that many of his comments were short and unrevealing. Although this is primarily a news and links site, it is nevertheless a weblog, and the author’s insight and feelings are a key element in blogging.

The Mediaburn Radio weblog is essentially a collection of various links, some interesting and some not. The blog doesn’t have a specific target group – it’s content ranges from everything to current events to technology. If you’re a fan of mediaburn.net, then I recommend you visit the blog. Otherwise, you can find most of the information on the blog on the pages of Yahoo.com and CNN.The Mediaburn Radio Weblog

Finally a site that I can immediately identify with, stuffed with honesty from the first line I see;
“Welcome to my weblog. I whinge a lot but my heart is in the right place… “
This is one of the few websites that I feel doesn’t maintain a false pretense of blogger glory. The clean, but typical ‘blog’ layout is used wisely (unlike some horrors I’ve seen in the past, and for once, the sidebar isn’t longer than the actual blog. (However it would be suggestable to archive weekly or monthly rather than daily)

Reading on I was delighted to grasp a taste of Matthew’s daily life consisting of a mixture of current affairs, daily excursions and the trivialities of life, all nicely illustrated with relevant pictures. I particularly identified with the boredom entry.. and titillated by the picture to go with it! A paragraph of speculative nonsense always calms the soul.

Focusing on the story matrix, an interactive story generator, the idea is highly amusing however proven to be effective. I’d love to see more of this on the website.

Target audience would involve anyone with two eyes and a brain to process it! Wombleweb provides a taste of life in Wimbledon (without the false Womble pretenses of course..)wombleweb story matrix