Month: November 2005

Harmonic Convergence is penned by a middle-aged American woman in Northern California who immediately strikes me as social and outgoing. Her weblog is not updated often and like most blogs, is filled with posts about what the author has been up to lately.

She sings, although we never hear her, she reads, watches movies, observes the weather, reviews music performances, and loves her dog Lola but I get the sense that she has a deeper side that isn’t seen on her website that might give readers a better insight into her state of mind.

The look and feel of the site is fairly basic although the header image showing the author “through the years” is a nice touch and the blogger template is simple and clean. I’m no fan of the pink-on-purple fauvist logo however which makes me eyes hurt if I look at for too long.

Overall I found Harmonic Convergence wanting. Imagine the odd email from your mother telling you what she has been doing with accompanying photos and this is precisely what you will find here. It’s great for friends and family to keep tabs on the girl, but lacks the depth of content or regularity to encourage regular readers. NULL

Mrs. Mogul welcomes you with a bubble-gum colored template that lends an air of whimsical reading entertainment. The colors and layout remind me of those Chic Lit cover books that continue to grow in its popularity, thereby earning its own Chic Lit section in bookshops.

True to its delight-in-our-womanhood-style, the entries are highly entertaining. Her earlier entries were recounts of her “brushing elbows” with the stars and her exposure to their world by being in the industry herself (through interviews, or auditions, or modeling stints, or friends who foray into this area). These are all in addition to her experiences of living a life away from home.

Her recent entries focus on the jitters and excitement of becoming a mother which earned her a place in the 2005 Weblog Awards under the Best Parenting category. Overall, her pieces are imaginative and written with witty touches of conversational form, be it with her future baby, or with her Mother, or with David Letterman interviewing her. Even David couldn’t stop her from stretching the one hour show with her narratives.

Thanks to the Web Divas who designed her blog, Mrs. Mogul has a coherent theme of being a delightful eye-candy blogger together with her visual posts that are all too often entertaining and humorous. The general feel is having the best of both American (stars and glitterati) and British (humor) worlds. Her links are quite interesting. I suspect they are web friends who share her passion for light and easy reads.

Mogul is defined as a “very rich or powerful” person. In this case, the Missus is a rich storyteller and a powerful one to induce hefty laughter from her big audience. Keep up the great work!

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When I first read the name of this blog, the young adolescent male inside of me jumped up and down and said “Awesome!” For some reason I knew this was going to be an interesting site to look at, er I mean read.

So the page loads and I am given a bright pink background with a slightly modified word press layout. There are ads a plenty on this site (and why wouldn’t there be) and all of your standard blog links (rss, my yahoo, archives, etc…) It was disappointing that the author didn’t even create a header graphic with an image in it, but I guess they wanted the advertising space.

So the blog itself is more like a catalog of items that you can purchase. The descriptions are short, maybe two sentences long and when you click “continue reading” you are given another two. This is not a blog in your standard idea. You don’t get to know anything about anything. Sure there are descriptions about each item, but seriously I was expecting articles on lingerie. Stuff about how it empowers women, what’s hot this season, and articles on changes in the industry. Victoria’s Secret just had a big event and no word on that.

This is not a blog, it is a sales catalog. There is no reason I would go to this site on a daily, weekly, or even monthly basis. In fact, I don’t ever see myself returning to this site. I give it a 1 only because they do update regularly and have a good idea just poor execution.
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Ladelentes, what does that mean anyway? I was intrigued by the title and by the nice layout of the blog but I was disappointed when I clicked on the profile and didn’t get much info on the author other than she’s female and lives in the United Kingdom. I suppose not offering up much info about yourself is ok but I was disappointed, I like to know more about the blog authors I visit.

Most of the posts on this blog are short and simple. I say simple because the posts really consist of a few incomplete sentences containing thoughts. There doesn’t seem to be any order or story to the posts, which sort of left me detached. Although I liked the posts in an artful, poetic sort of way, after reading them they all started to blend together. I could create a picture in my mind about what the author is describing and sometimes even feeling, but since she didn’t provide any in depth description of herself, it was hard for me to really connect to anything she wrote about. I love poetry and these posts did have some poetic style to them. I had to assume that the author was going for more of a poetic stance rather than trying to provide some sort of window to her soul.

The design of the site is easy to read. Nice bold typeface and links down the left-hand side made this blog easy to navigate. I also liked the page title and the lack of capitol letters throughout the entire site because it emphasizes the poetic quality of the blog.

I didn’t see many extras on the blog but I did notice a link named ’43 things’ which gives a list of things the author is doing or wants to do. This link finally gives you a little peek into who this blogger is but it comes so far down the page it kind of gets lost under the archives and links.

Overall I liked the blog. The posts were simple and came across as free from poetry. I’d recommend this site to poetry buffs or readers in search of creative writing. I gave this blog a rating of 5 for it’s poetic form.NULL

“Stalkers Not Allowed” is the name of this weblog. A name like that left the door wide open as to what directions the author could have taken her entries at this site.

To find more about the author, I had to dig up the information from the Blogger profile listed in the sidebar. The author is a 21-year-old female student from Ontario, Canada. I don’t think it could get any more basic than that.

My biggest complaint about weblogs right now are the fact that so many of them are based off one particular template. Unfortunately, these standardized templates are bringing back light colored text on a dark background. Just like you wouldn’t want to read a newspaper or magazine with this type of an appearance, it makes a weblog harder to physically read.

The author changes the appearance of this standard template a bit by adding original artwork by “r. hutcheson”. The images that are chosen do break up the dark background, but still don’t help much with the white text that’s used throughout the site.

I went back to see how this weblog started, perhaps find a little background information about the author. The first post that’s listed on the site is from August 23, 2004. The post consists of the lyrics to a Billy Joel song and a link to a history professor at the University of Michigan. That post obviously didn’t give me any info that I was hoping to find.

Several of the author’s posts contain her reviews and thoughts on recent books she’s read or movies she has seen. Her opinions are very clearly written, and as with any review, they give readers a general idea towards whether or not that particular movie or book is worth checking into. The author does a good job of not intentionally swaying people one way or the other, but giving more of a non-judgemental synopsis.

It was refreshing to find an author who appreciates fine art like poetry and paintings, in addition to modern pop culture. She doesn’t hesitate to expose her readers to new pieces of art that they may have had no reason to check out on their own.

Overall, this isn’t a weblog I would revisit. I couldn’t find anything interesting in the posts that left me sitting wanting to read more by this author. While the writing is fine, it doesn’t do anything to capture an audience. Those who know things more personally about this author than what is revealed on her weblog may have a differing opinion, but for someone that had no idea she even had a weblog until it was submitted to The Weblog Review, I don’t think it’s something I would add to my list of bookmarks.NULL