My first impression on entering Mediaburn was that although the site looked clean and easy on the eye, it also looked like every other Radio UserLand weblog out there. But the simple design still looked good enough to make me want to stay a while and look around.
The description given on the Mediaburn site says, “Mediaburn is a free-form, independent resource for news, information, music and the arts.” It certainly was free-form. The news doesn’t focus on one subject, such as technology. Instead, the links and short posts varied from being about politics, to weblogs to films/movies, either chosen by the site director or sent in by readers. Although I liked this variety it did mean that Mediaburn couldn’t be used as a source alone to gather your daily news. However, it is obviously already being taken seriously as one source of news due to the option to translate the site into various languages.
I felt that the layout and navigation were not as effective as they could be. The archives were difficult to navigate because you could only go back one month at a time, and then you could only go through each month one day at a time, which became hard work and often caused me to give up looking for a particular day’s news. The site could do with a little more organisation, such as sorting the news into fields.
From the positive comments of current Mediaburn users, and the evidence that the site has grown since it began, such as the increased frequencey of entries, I think that this weblog is worth keeping an eye on, as it looks set to become a prominent site in the future.The Mediaburn Radio Weblog