I started looking at “Hi. I’m Black!” and was looking forward to a good read. Almost every blog I’ve reviewed here has been filled with well written posts, and an interesting perspective. Most of them have had a nice design/layout.
The design of this blog is nice. It’s Moveable Type, with some nice personal touches in color and placement. The navigation is easy, and the color choices are nice, excepting the mouseover color. It blends in to the background too much. The rest of the look is a nice blend of contrasting colors making it easy to read.
I can’t say enough about the content of “Hi. I’m Black!”. Really, I can’t find the words to say much of anything about the site.
Oh wait, I have a few: bland, boring, uninspired, weak, uninteresting…
The author makes a few pointed statements, but doesn’t bother to back them up. For example, in a post called “I’m Angry”, he just rants about his co-worker who ratted him out. He never makes a point other than that he has finally learned his lesson with this person. There are several short articles about a Team Blog he wants to start which are probably better suited to email. In an article called “Whoa!”, he starts to talk about the situation in the mid-east, devoting three paragraphs to it, summing it up in his third paragraph (actually two sentence fragments connected with an ellipsis) by saying he likes the writing of the author of the site where he read about the problem. It makes you wonder if he actually has an understanding of the problems there to give an informed, well written opinion.
In one of the better written articles on baseball, he starts talking about facts and figures, even mentioning the National Leage MVP from 1998, without mentioning the name of this person. It is an attempt at journalism from the site’s author, but not well done. If you’re going to tell me about someone’s accomplishments, at least tell me who that person is.
Another article mentions his disgust for the emergence of a new product. The product is a bobble-head doll of Justice Rehnquist. As of this sentence, I’ve written more about the entry, than the author of the site wrote about his disgust. You’d think someone could give a little more thought to something which gets him hot under the collar.
The site’s author puts it best in his site design, where it tells you about who made the entry. Instead of the typical “submitted by” or “posted by”, it very aptly says, “babbled by”.
To be fair, you’ll find a few posts where the author finds something to write about, and does really dig his fingernails into it. However, those posts are few and far between. Reading some of the older posts from when he started, you can see the learning curve he went through. It’s nice to see how someone can grow and learn, and it appears as though the author reads his own work since there are signs of improvement from the early days of the site.
This blog is not worth your time. However, if you’re the type of person who sees a dead rat and is morbidly curious, you might find some fascination with it. Sadly, it will take some time before this site becomes one worth reading on a regular basis.
I’d like to come back to this blog in a month or so and update this review to show me how wrong I’ve been about the writing. Seeing the improvements the author has made on his own, I hope he takes this review as the impetus to make improvements in his writing. Here’s to hope!Hi. I’m Black!