Month: April 2001

My first impression of this webpage was that it look alright, it took a minute or two for my cable modem to download the top picture though. When reading the posts I was thinking about how horribly I was going to diss on the page until I started participating and searching through the linked sites some more and I guess they where actually amusing. The owner – I think – just goes through the web everyday and finds one or two sites to link that he found amusing, making the page the product of a manic websurfer. This site is also somewhat of a personal site and a comedy site but more in a news/links format.



I like the site, it doesn’t have alot of other content to offer but there enough archives to keep you busy for a while. I would personally go back so that’s why I gave it a 3.5 rating.Funktrain

The title of this weblog gave me the impression that this weblog would be humorous but instead I found a weblog mostly about food and the day to day happenings at work.



When I started to read the beginning posts I thought maybe this weblog was more of a news type weblog but as I read more and more I found the writer talking about food, especially coffee. Now and then there was a post about something that was happening in their life. The only thing I know about the writer is they have a teenage daughter. I am not sure what country they come from or what they like- other than food. I think knowing so little about the author made me feel like this weblog was a bore. I would like to hear about the author’s personal life and more about how she feels about different things instead of hearing about food for most posts. I also found I felt lost about what the author was talking about at times because I do not have similar interests, or have never heard of the famous people she was talking about. I guess I am not a food lover so this weblog isn’t really for me. The grammar and spelling in this weblog was really good!



The design is a basic blogger template, very neat and tidy.



I recommend this weblog to people who really love food, coffee and enjoy reading about people’s work and aren’t interested in what the author’s life is really like.



BobtheCorgi

It’s not certain where exactly nu-produkt is located, but judging from the bullet-proof grammar, diction, and syntax of the posts, and frequent UK-references, I’d say it was located somewhere in the Ozarks. I’m probably wrong, though. [Ed: Maybe I should have gone with my first guess… whatever.]



nu-produkt is a loose confederation of web designers (translation: a group blog), and is apparently operated by a fellow named littleboy. The design is excellent: non-intrusive, balanced, innovative. The site’s audience seems to be fairly broad–it earns about 1700 visits per month–yet parts of the page are probably only understood by a small group of people (the bloggers themselves, I presume).



The content is mostly web- and tech-based, usually short and bite-sized. I haven’t been disappointed with a single link yet. They recently completed a Shockwave-based game in which you can choose which nu-produkt blogger you want to be, and which enemy you want to destroy. If you beat the game, you win a nu-produkt t-shirt. I haven’t beaten the game yet, but I bet the t-shirt is cool.



The best thing about this site are the tidbits they throw in: random graphics and animations, sound clips, editorials, even a random lyric quite from Nas or Mos-Def.



nu-produkt seems only to have been around since mid-August, 2001, when they gave away their “twat of the year award” (don’t ask me). It’s not a “daily read” for me, but it’s certainly promising. Definitely worth the time to browse around.nu-produkt

An oldy and a goody. Probably one of the first blogs I ever encountered. This is one of what I call the “upper tier” of blogs. That is, there’s a small group of blogs that have been around since Blogger began, that are almost synonymous with the world ‘blog,’ that get a good deal of traffic, and that are usually somehow connected to Pyra, either by former employment or friendship.



That being side, the design of caterina.net actually isn’t very good, and hasn’t been updated in recent memory, but that matters little. The focus is on the content.



It’s the site of Caterina Fake, who’s now in Vancouver, having just recently relocated there from San Francisco. She just got herself a chihuahua named Dos Pesos, because she fell in love with Heather Champ and Derek Powazek’s (two more big blog names) two critters.



What you’ll find in Caterina’s postings is a teeming, prolific intelligence. She’s very well read–you can tell, because she has a list of every book she’s ever read–quite articulate, and fair in her analysis. You won’t find an explosion of personality and humor, however, although she is wonderfully amusing and very witty at times, cute and playful at others. Ultimately, every post is rewarding, and you definitely have to be a loyal reader to keep up (she updates often, and is verbose, like this review).



All in all, caterina.net is very safely established in what I call “the daily read” category.Caterina.Net

After about 5 minutes of reading through Fort Drastic, I was finally able to figure out what it was all about. I think my age is starting to show due to my lack of insight into current youth culture. This became evident to me as I tried to figure out what was going on here. However, once I had it squared away, I thoroughly enjoyed myself.

Fort Drastic is a group weblog that is run by a half-dozen or so guys. These guys contribute to the site in various ways: from weblog entries to music reviews to writings and seethings. My interest was piqued among most areas of the site, though I must say the weblog page itself wasn’t overly stimulating. Short entries that didn’t really make sense to me (perhaps my age showing again) were sprinkled lightly with links to off-site and local content.

I had the most fun reading through other sections of the site, such as the Mountainspace and Review areas. Digging through the archives surfaced more good stuff to read. I also liked the Grits area, which was a page full of off-site links you usually don’t see on other weblogs. Having been in a band that opened for GG Allin back in 1990, I was particularily amused at the link to his site. (My age comes through again).

Each contributor to the site had a short bio, all of which were humorous, to say the least. I especially liked that of Buss Russ, who offered insights into sneaking drugs out of El Salvador in boxes marked “Tube Socks”.

The overall design of the site was decent, though a little confusing at times. I kept trying to click on little icons and things that looked like buttons, to no avail. However, the navigation was simple and nothing crashed my browser or annoyed me into leaving; a definite problem among similar sites I have reviewed

For a good display of what a group weblog can do when several people put their minds to it, go check out Fort Drastic. By all means an entertaining site.
Fort Drastic