Month: January 1970

VoIP is huge right now. The uptake is only now beginning to surge as broadband users around the world choose providers and hardware to setup their own residential VoIP connections, and save themselves a pretty packet. I’m happy to review this site because I am a VoIP consultant myself, webmaster of a VoIP choice consumer website and Sys Admin for an ISP so I feel a little qualified to review the content.

Content aside for the moment, the CSS breaks down in my Safari browser so I reluctantly fire up IE. I like the clean blogstreet template, but its a little dull. VoIP is a dry topic at the best of times so a little pizzaz on the design wouldn’t go astray.

The blog discusses issues with this relatively new technology such as PC to phone dialing, VoIP and autodialers, VoIP disadvantages, USB phones, Wifi VoIP, industry news etc. The author writes succinctly and easily and its refreshing to read tech info in layman’s terms. I was disappointed however to read the December 8 post about Flyphone VoIP (USB based) that reads more like an advertisement than a review and based on my prior knowledge of this companies aggressive online marketing strategy I’m pretty sure it is.

As blogs take on a more prominent role in mainstream media, I believe authors will need to make their own decision with editorial guidelines for where posts and ads become harder to distinguish. In major print media, these lines are clearly defined so blogs need to think about their editorial standards. This blog certainly seems to be linking commercial websites within posts so the relationship is unclear.

Voice Over IP and Internet Telephony could do with a more imaginative title, but I suspect this site is just trying to be googlebot friendly in order to pull more traffic for its sponsors. Its content is generally good and well written but risks falling into the splog (spam-blog) category without better execution. A good read mostly, but could use a spit and polish. NULL

The New School Geek Cynic(TNSGC) is a fairly clean looking weblog with a banner at the top that looks kind of sucky. “Sucky” is a technical word that us professional reviewers use that means the thing we’re looking at is not very good. A common example of usage might be “That Nebyah writes some pretty sucky reviews.”

Anyway, the author, NSG, has what he describes as a personal weblog, and before you all decide to just switch over to another channel let me interject here and say that there are very few posts of the “I think Cadburys chocolates are great” variety. There is absolutely no mention of relationship difficulties, or pet cats or any of that mindblowingly tedious stuff.

Rather what you’re going to find here is game reviews, movie reviews, TV show reviews, and some rants, mixed in with the occasional diversion into website design issues he may be having, or the merits of Cadbury chocolates. (And by the way NSG I am totally with you on the subject of mindless blogs.)

I cannot comment on the accuracy of his reviews, since I have not seen any of the movies or shows he mentions, or played any of the games. However the reviews seem to be well thought-out, and the writing is good enough, and entertaining.

The design is pretty standard Blogger fare, which is fine by me. As long as it doesn’t interfere with the content I really couldn’t give a toss about design. And anyway who the hell do these airy-fairy arty types thing they are, dammit. The web is for text, and all of this awful graphics stuff is just a massive bandwidth wasting con designed to hide the fact that most sites have no content whatsoever.

Ok, so here’s the thing. As a personal blog it is not very personal. As a movie review weblog it has far too many game reviews, and vice versa. So who should read it? If you want to read reviews of movies and TV and games… but then why not just go to IMDB for movies, and one of a million specialist game sites for game reviews?

I’m inclined to think that NSG needs to pick a topic, but what the hell do I know.NULL

Cutesy is not a real word but if it was it would be a good way to describe my first impression of the design of this site. Pink, pretty, flowery, girly. I go straight to the authors blogger profile and see a huge amount of info about our hosts interests and favorite things and one of those mysterious photos you sometimes see. Is she hot? She kinda looks hot.. although I can’t really tell because the postage-stamp sized photo has her looking away. But thats ok, privacy and tact are a bloggers license after all.

Jessica loves her music and culture and her blog is thick with lists, photos, portraits, reviews and news. She sums them up pretty nicely and gives us her views on all these things interrupted only by news about her life and movements. She writes well but it doesn’t suck me in totally, and the site has not been updated for several weeks now. When she is on a roll, she will write long blocks of text without breaking them up into paragraphs to make them more readable, bite sized chunks of information.

The content basically revolves around not so much “the world” as “Jess’ world” and the things she is into at any given point in time. For example at the time of writing this there is a lengthy post on handbags that is probably fascinating for bag aficionado’s but doesn’t register on my fun-o-meter. But then, I’m not a girly girl like Jessica either.

World According to Jes is a nice looking site with heaps to see and read. It is a mish-mash of popular culture and Jessica’s day to day stuff with the potential for improvement, not a bad read but could be better. NULL

Self confessed geeks unite! This blog from the UK is brought to us from another proud “new skool geek” who isn’t afraid to voice his opinion on the hard hitting issues like, what’s on television and why it sucks, 3d engine performance on recently released first person shooters and poorly documented Internet Explorer CSS bugs.

Popular culture is all important for geek kind, and our author lets us into his tech bubble to share his thoughts and ideas on the modern world. Written with true geek egoism, we are enlightened in the Mac vs PC debate and our authors favorite films of all time. I’ll give it to him, he has good taste and a good reviewing style. Again, I wish this blog had more regular updates.

One post in particular struck a chord with me perhaps due to my newly found role as TWR reviewer – “Mindless Blogs” and I quoth “I have a question for these people… WHY THE F**K DO YOU THINK WE GIVE A S**T?!!!” That’s a very good question. A good blog will make us give a s**t, whether we want to or not!

The design is clean and well presented with easy to read text, but the guy is a seasoner web designer so your eyes are in good hands. The New School Geek Cynic is a well written blog for all lovers of popular culture and is not UK-centric either. Worth a visit and with more frequent posts, worth a re-visit.NULL

What an interesting blog! Every now and then you come across a blog which is earnest and sincere to the point where you know the author has true conviction. In the case of Alabama Improper, a patriotic southern girl lets it rip.

She espouses her conservative catholic values, which can sometimes seem contradictory as religious dogma often does, but she does it unashamedly denouncing premarital sex in one post, and singing pro-war sentiment in the next. Although it makes my left-wing blood boil, its this kind of free speech that we all have to value and that really emphasizes the unique nature of the blogosphere.

Interestingly, despite being a devout and pious catholic, wife and mother, she swears like a salty sea dog! She writes well and I cannot fault her relaxed style which is consistent and strong but the blog often tends towards local clubs, sport or events so true to the site name, it really is an Alabama blog with a global audience to bear witness to some southern comfort.

The site is easy on the eyes, although the header photo is somewhat blurry and odd looking, the layout is familiar blogger fare and extremely long, with an exhaustive list of blogs, and patriot logos littered over the right hand side.

If strong right wing, liberal Americana rants by an ultra-conservative southern catholic girl is your cup of tea, Alabama Improper will do it for you. The authors combination of political opinion, religious fervor and almost fundamentalist pro-south zealotry certainly make interesting reading.
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