Review 3197

When I thought about the title of this blog, I thought this was going to be a site for men to rant about things. I don’t know why, it is just what I thought I would read. Unfortunately I was wrong. When the site loads the header tells us that this site is “Comments, mini-essays, anecdotes and quotations on language, literature, politics, the arts and almost anything else. Some are quite serious but most are not. Updated every two days or so.” Can we be any more straight forward on what to expect?

The blog uses a blogger template. Sure it is one of the less used ones, but I really wish the author would use his own design. The header has a little graphic, but that is it. The rest is standard. Oh yeah, before I forget its that brown flowery background one with the cream color main area.

Well the author doesn’t lie. He really does blog about almost everything. His posts are very long and detailed which I would normally be all for. However I found the posts to be quiet boring. The posts read very monotone like, almost as if Al Gore was writing this blog (please don’t let the author be Al Gore and let Tony be the author’s real name).

After reading through over half of the posts, I realized that this author could not be from the US and was probably from Europe. Little things like colour instead of color tipped me off, and then it made sense for how well written this author is. He definitely had a more strict/formal education than I have and it shows. I was finally happy that I was able to figure something out about this blog.

Overall I don’t know if I could recommend this blog. If you like a blog that has a lot of content, then this might be for you. For me though it just was not catching enough to keep me entertained. The best comparison I have is that this is like that foreign movie that some of us like, and some of us don’t.
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Review 3203

Well, guess what, it’s a blog about sex. The blog contains graphic, not particularly original, slightly titillating descriptions of sexual encounters from a woman’s point of view. How old is this woman? I’m not sure. Where does she live? I don’t know. Is there any purpose to this blog besides the sexual stories? If there is, I can’t tell.

The stories are jumbled and rambling. The author is married but has sexual relationships with other men. I was lost in this blog–I’m not particularly interested in reading about sexual adventures without any narrative framing. Without a context for these encounters, I actually find them to be a turn off. The graphic nature of the encounters are a bit disturbing. I am sure that many people, male and female, will find this material quite compelling. The purpose? Perhaps to detail the author’s sexual adventures and fantasies? Seems likely.

The quality of the writing is adequate. Writing good erotica is quite difficult and this author does little more than a pedestrian job. The lack of character development and context is a serious weakness. The details are what makes any story compelling, even if we know it will end in a sexual encounter. The how and why also matter, not just the what.

The site design is pink and sloppy. The right column contains a random mix of links, Japanese-anime style cartoon drawings of scantily clad women, badges and counters. I can’t make much sense of the author’s method of categorizing links, but most them appear to be sexual in nature.

This blog is not my cup of tea, but if you are looking for simple stories of graphic sexual encounters, you may enjoy it.NULL

Review 3215

All your blogs are belong to us!

If I was a stalker, and enjoyed stalking psudeo intellectual middle aged web developers, “All your blogs are belong to us!” would be in my bookmarks. Our Author AJ, admits freely in the tagline “It’s just stuff”. And he is right.. its a whole lotta stuff, mostly trivial little things that somehow turn into pages and page of text. Its not bad text, no. In fact its written very well. Some of it is really straight from the heart and fairly interesting, and some just isn’t. Less is more sometimes.

If AJ hadn’t admitted to being a web designer I might have been a bit more forgiving, but there is no excuse for leaving the blogger template pretty well as-is since 2002. Surely a web designer would rip that blogger headline bar out of the CSS template before uttering a word.. but I don’t think AJ’s main reason for blogging is the design at all. Like most personal blogs I think the reason for writing varies. Sometimes its to vent, sometimes to laugh, and sometimes its just to order ones own thoughts by writing them down.

AJ doesn’t hold back and doesn’t make any apologies for his wordy, sometimes fragmented raves. Some of his favorites are interesting and there some genuinely well written posts in there, but unless you get caught up in AJ’s world and his friends, the posts probably won’t entertain you for long. Not a bad effort overall and with a few loving touches to the CSS it could even be a little better. NULL

Review 3359

Eyes For Lies is a blog about a “wizard,” or one who has the innate ability to TELL if someone is telling a big fat goober of a fib.

Our author takes a look at big stories in the media where people are looked at closely, mostly murder mysteries or missing people cases, and she examines video to show points where she personally believes they are not being 100% truthful, or are downright lying.

I fell asleep on Monday at 7pm and woke up at 11, and couldn’t get back to sleep. I figured I’d come in here to find a blog to review and ended up reading Eyes for Lies until about 2:45 am when I had to force myself to stop and go to bed.

Admittedly, I love a good media sensationalism story and the media circus that surrounds a lot of the modern Whodunnits. Eyes for Lies takes events in the news from said media circuses in the form of video testimony and news reports… from JonBenet Ramsey to Natalie Holloway, from Anna Nicole to the Duke Rape Case, and really examines the people involved. She studies the the dead give-aways and so incredibly subtle the average bear would miss them clues that abound, and she interprets what SHE thinks is the truth.

The blog itself is a blogspot site, that links back to her official URL, and on occasion I lost myself trying to get back and forth between the blogspot site and her About and other pages inside the official site. It took me a little while to figure out the gianormous eyeball was the “home” button in the blog, but once I did the reading through the archives began to flow very easily.

Sometimes, Eyes for Lies states the painfully obvious, like Howard K. Stern is full of malarkey and Larry Birkhead is the baby daddy of Anna Nicole Smith’s little cherub. Like anyone didn’t KNOW that. That one was almost a “duh.” But she goes into other media cases that I didn’t even know about and really peels back the onion skin layers, asking why the person is chuckling at certain questions and explaining why that is a big ding-ding-ding revelation moment for her. She even at the early part of her blog (2004) has an entry about how she knows when her husband is telling a lie. God help the man if he just wants to go out and play poker with the boys. Heh.

The only real complaint I have about the blog is that on the less “superstar” kinds of cases she doesn’t start with a short blurb about who the person and the case are. I had no idea who Adam Saleh was, nor Daniel Wade Moore and Ryan Ferguson. I think that when she is writing about someone less stellar than say, Anna Nicole, a brief synopsis of the person and the case at the beginning of the entry would be helpful.

Eyes For Lies explains a lot about how she sees what she sees, gives the reader insight so they too can read a liar’s eyes and see their traits. She also takes time to show us her garden and tell us a beautiful story about her 20 year old tortoise shell kitty who passed away a few years back. All told, this is an interesting read, and I wonder if she thinks the whole Rosie/Elisabeth thing was staged or not. She invites readers to ask her questions about what is going on in the media and what her opinion is… perhaps I’ll drop her a line and ask this.

Because Eyes For Lies kept me up until ungodly and ugly hours of the morning, I shake a fist at her. And I give her a 3.5 rating. Adding the brief synopsis and posting a little more frequently would push things up a bit for this reviewer. In the meantime, I’ve bookmarked her to come back and see who else is a BFL.NULL

Review 3388

I wasn’t sure how a “Web 2.0 Directory” would qualify as a blog. But it turns out that the author has made his “Directory” a blog and not a directory at all.

The first thing I noticed was that the url for this site was a blogspot hosted site. I have nothing against blogs being on blogspot per say, but if you are going to have a site called “Web 2.0 Directory” I think it should be hosted at its own domain.

The design of the site is rather bland and boring. It has this massive header that tells us the site has been around since December of 2006 and is tracking all the new web sites out there. Ok that’s fine, but 33% of my screen for this header is not needed. The rest of the design is a standard 3 column layout with the content in the center. Nothing about this design says “Hi I am a directory”.

The posts are boring as all get out. In fact they don’t really do much of anything other than describe a website. Some of the descriptions are one sentence long which leads me to my next thought about this site.

The site screams it is a spam site. Or at the very least, set up to just generate money and not actually do anything for the reader. There are many little details that lead me to believe this. First the author had the max number of google ads on the site. In addition to those the author has a nice break down of categories and wouldn’t you believe that the Pay Per Post category has one of the most posted to categories?

In addition to that the author has at the end of every post a link to every single site that you can submit your URL to such as del.icio.us, digg and others. All in the hopes that people will link back to his site.

This site fails miserably at what it says it is. It is not a directory by any means. It isn’t even what one would call a “Web 2.0” site. I really think the author should say that the purpose of the site is just to make me money and that is it. I think a complete restructuring of the site is needed if he wants to keep using the “Web 2.0 Directory” as the name of his blog.

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