When I first got to fBlog, I noticed that it didn’t look like a conventional blog and looked more akin to a giant content management system. The blog seems to have been established since May of last year, however trying to access the posts during this period was challenge that I eventually succumbed to because of the poorly designed Archive system.
The blogger himself doesn’t really give away much information about himself. Sure, we know that his favourite colour is orange and that he likes bands such as Bowling For Soup but there’s very little personal information divulged and I had to resort to using my detective skills to unveil his first name from his email address. We also don’t know where he’s from. Initially I thought America, because he used the grade system when referring to school but then I noticed that he likes Cricket, a sport that would be unheard of in the US so I’m guessing he lives in a country that’s a dominion of Great Britain, maybe Australia?
What struck me as being particularly strange was that this blog has very short posts. This maybe intentional to prevent people from being bored by long, in depth posts. However, as an over-analytic, it had the opposite effect on me and I soon found myself to be viewing a tonne of posts that were lacking creativity, personality and intellect. Don’t get me wrong, some posts are indeed long, but they too bored me! Maybe I’m just hard to please or maybe this blogger hasn’t quite honed his writing style yet. It’s not all bad though. Some posts were interesting and very thought-provoking (such as his post on Friend-ism) but the majority of the blogs here seem to be just the blogger reporting on his daily life in a not so personal style. This means that as an outsider I have a fairly good idea of whats going on so the blog isn’t just confined to those who personally know the blogger.
As I said earlier, the site appears to look more like a CMS that you’d see on a Tech news site for example and not a blog! Maybe that’s because there’s a lot of extra features down the sidebar. On most other blogs you’d expect to see links to the archives, maybe a profile and a few buttons and not much else. On this site however, you’re treated to a whiteboard, buttons, a hit map, a poll, a chatterbox, a friends list, blog information, links, an image gallery and a calender which makes the word “overkill” spring to mind.
Now it may appear that I’ve been very pessimistic towards this blog throughout the review but that’s just because I find with Personal blogs that you either fall for them straight-away or just can’t get yourself around them. This, for me, was the latter! However not everyone feels this way because of the presence of a small community that regularly comments on the posts which is something I just didn’t feel compelled to do.
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