The Weblog Review

Since the name Valley of the Shadow doesn’t give me much info, I looked at the url for some advice. This is a blogspot blog which isn’t always a bad thing, but it also doesn’t help matters. I went to this site open minded, not sure what to find.

The first thing I noticed was that it was a slightly modified blogspot template. It has an original banner at the top which is nice, and the entire background is blue with white text. So while it isn’t great, it is definately not bad either. The phrase in the banner says “A blog about Local and National Politics, news, culture and Vignettes from the Valley of the Shadow” so that is what I expect to read.

The blog is definately a political blog. The author Joey calls himself an institutionalist. He even defines it as:

Institutionalist:(N) Someone who respects the institutions of Government and Social protocols.

Even though he is an institutionalist he is more of a republican than a democrat.

The posts all talk about our government and what they are doing right and what they are doing wrong. I don’t agree with his point of view, but I do respect it as he presents his opinions very well. All the posts are well written and easy to read. Most of his posts have a bit of a personal flair to them that makes reading them enjoyable instead of being drab.

One of the things that stuck out to me with this blog was the huge amount of links in the 2nd column. In fact this column is huge, that it requires 16 page downs to get to the end of it. Thankfully the author is smart enough to ensure that there are enough posts on the page to not have a bunch of white space. I am not sure what all of those links are for, but it is rather large.

In addition to the links there are a large number of advertisements in the column which don’t really seem to fit in at all. Finally the one thing that drove me crazy was that between the post’s title and the body there was a blurb for donations. While this was fine the first couple of times I read it, I found it very distracting by about the 30th post onward.

Overall I enjoyed this site. While it is still early for election stuff only in the primaries, there is a lot of good information to be had. When it gets closer to the main election I am sure this site is going to be a great one to read.NULL

Gary states in his profile that his “purpose in life is to make people laugh, and then when they aren’t looking, slap them in the face and run away. The blog “The Title is Irrelevant… Or Is It?” is classified as a humor blog, and was introduced to the world in September of 2007.

The blog is a standard blogger template with very nice complimentary colors in shades of teal, blue and white. His profile states he is a 51 year old student in Land O’Lakes Florida, but reading through the content of the blog reveals he isn’t quite that old. In fact, he just turned 18.

In an early entry, he discusses the magic of internet anonymity and how people can paint all kinds of pictures about who they are, or aren’t. He discusses past blogging experiences, specifically on the experiences he had with his humor/advice blog Gary’s Advice Column. He discovers that on the internet, people take things very seriously, even when things are meant to be humorous… and things can often take an uncomfortable turn when you’re advising people what to do with their unwanted babies.

While he confesses that he has been a failure as a blogger in the past, compared to his other blogs, this blog can already be considered a success. In two short months he’s managed to post more than he did in two whole years on his other blogs. So he’s off to a decent start.

On the Zombie entry all the pictures are missing. I enjoyed the photos of his sculptures. The blog doesn’t have a lot of photo content, so it loads very fast and the entries are substantial in length, which is nice in a world of 3 second sound bytes.

The title of a blog may be irrelevant, but the content should be. Gary’s blog isn’t slap in the face funny. There are a lot more honest and not quite amusing but real, honest observations (ie: Cell phones in class going off and the immaturity of some students in the face of professors) that are actually better than some joke pulled off the internet or the recruiter phone call discussion. Gary should keep writing, the content is relevant even if it is not slap in your face funny.

I give the blog a 3.25, and am reclassifying the blog as “personal” instead of “humor.” I fully encourage Gary to keep writing situational observations about what is going on around him. I agreed with a lot of what he had to say (if my dad ever came in and told me to “smell the bathroom” I’d probably say out loud what he thought in his head…) and I think he’s off to a good start. NULL

The Mad City Dash is the blog of Ben, the self-proclaimed cyber bum. He is a homeless man who has recently moved to Madison Wisconsin from Mississipi (from what I gather in his entries). Ben has a laptop and a T-mobile phone, and is blogging his experiences on the street. It is a standard blogger blog with very few distracting features. There is a link to google video, where you can watch a few of the videos he has taken with his phone (when his phone doesn’t run out of minutes), something called “blogTV” which I didn’t go visit but found to be not very obtrusive to the look and feel of the site, and a link to a paypal account where if you feel like it you can send him a donation.

There isn’t a lot of content just yet. About 33 entries, most about his struggle with the bureaucracy of the DMV in trying to get a photo ID now that he lives in Madison. Ben takes pictures of meals at homeless shelters and people he meets around, and right when the blog starts to get a feel that it is going somewhere, he launches a second blog, called Abstract Chaos. I don’t see the need for a second blog really, when there isn’t a lot of content in Mad City Dash. I got interested in what was going on with him, as he’s trying to find work, trying to find a way to get his laptop repaired, and just trying to get along in life.

I’m not sure if the launching of a second blog is indicative of the types of decisions Ben makes in his life but I get the feeling (33 entries does not a psychologist make me)… he just gets into something and jumps into something else. I’d like him to blog more about why he came to Madison, what brought him there, how he finds himself homeless… was there a home in Mississippi?

Part of me feels bad in assigning a rating to the blog, not because he’s homeless but because there isn’t a lot of content to judge. In an entry where he says he signed up for the weblogreview.com, he states “This might help me create better blogs. Now I just have to figure out better content. :)”

Dude… you’ve got better content!! The circus? You ran off and joined the circus and got sick and put into a hospital?!!! Hello — there is a HUGE story there. Write it.

Ben — You’re looking for feedback and encouragement towards better content. As someone who has written online since 2001, and written very personally — this is my advice to you brother.

Blogs are more than off colored jokes, links to pictures of Paris Hilton crotch shots, and rants about what a mess the Iraq war has become. Blogs are your opportunity to tell your story.

Your life is content.

Your situation is content.

Your views about how the DMV was messing with you — that was content.

Share.

Dig deep. View it as a confessional of sorts and the audience out here will grow. Write it. You’re living it — write it. Blogs don’t have to be about “today I had soup.” You can go from “this happened when I was 10” to “i got a new cell phone” to “this is what I think about Iraq” to “when I was in the circus…” It doesn’t have to be linear. It is story telling — and stories exist no matter the date. I’m sure you’ve got stories. Build them.

Share information that you find helpful or not helpful from a homeless person’s perspective. Maybe one day you won’t be a cyber bum, but you’ll be a cyber author, with enough stories to share across the globe.

For now, I give Ben the cyber bum a 2.75 and hope this does not hurt his feelings. I encourage him to keep writing, in shelters, libraries — wherever he can, whenever he can, and to focus. FOCUS on one blog and write it out there.

Best of luck to you brother … hang in there. NULL

Ok a word of warning. This site contains adult content. The author even says so herself that it is intended for the 18+ crowd. So with that said, lets get onto the review.

I knew this was going to be an adult themed blog by the name. When I arrived I was greeted with a black background and white text which seemed appropriate. The banner at the top is an image of a naked female with a big snake which works well. The rest of the design is a 3 column layout with white text and some blue and red’s for highlight.

The first thing I thought when I started reading this blog was that the author was well educated. It is one thing to write words down and hope they mean what you want. It is another thing to use the words in a great poetic sense and ensnare the reader’s mind with vivid details of what you want them to think. Anastasia is able to do this and more.

Some of the posts are fiction stories. Others are real life encounters. All of them are told in an amazing manner. Anastasia does have some regular posts through out her archives such as the Sunday man posts and stories that are also on scenes.

This blog is not for the weak of heart. Nor is it for someone who is tired and doesn’t want a challenge. This blog forces you to think which is a good thing. It takes something that is somewhat taboo, and put it into a good light. I was encouraged and enthused by the writing, and for that I give Sexualite a 4.NULL

My first thought when I saw the name Talent in China was that this was going to be some sort of adult website. After being on the internet for over a decade there is little that surprises me. Thankfully this was not an adult website.

Talent in China is written mostly by Frank Mulligan, though occasionally there are guest bloggers. All of the posts focus on the human resources aspect of a company. This includes, but is not limited to applying for a job, searching through all the candidates and actually running the HR office. One thing that struck me as odd was a lot of links to off-site job related sites. These seemed almost as if they were put into the post more for advertising revenue or seo purposes rather than providing any real benefit.

The posts, while informative, are extremely boring. I couldn’t even really relate to them with my own job searches. The posts are well written, but are written in a text book manner that doesn’t captivate the audience. I have seen some 2000 page medical books that explain everything but about one paragraph in, it puts me to sleep. This site had a similar affect.

The layout of the site is a very simple three column layout that we have all seen before. The author makes no real attempt to make the site more interesting, because that isn’t the goal of the site. The goal is just to present information and that is it.

The archives on this site are in the worst possible format. There is a calendar and you must select each day that has a post. Now I know a lot of people think this is a great way to display archives, but it isn’t. Especially when the site was nominated for a “best of blogs” award all the way back in 2005. This site would benefit a lot from an archive system that displayed all the posts for each month on the same page.

Overall I was pretty bored with this site. I do not fit into the target audience which is HR people. The information is presented very blandly and the archives leave me wanting to visit another site. The only major plus is that the information provided is well written and informative, but as I said it is rather dull. If you work in an HR department or are looking for a job in China, then by all means visit this site. I cannot give this site above the 2.25 rating because of all the flaws.NULL