Category: Uncategorized

All your blogs are belong to us!

If I was a stalker, and enjoyed stalking psudeo intellectual middle aged web developers, “All your blogs are belong to us!” would be in my bookmarks. Our Author AJ, admits freely in the tagline “It’s just stuff”. And he is right.. its a whole lotta stuff, mostly trivial little things that somehow turn into pages and page of text. Its not bad text, no. In fact its written very well. Some of it is really straight from the heart and fairly interesting, and some just isn’t. Less is more sometimes.

If AJ hadn’t admitted to being a web designer I might have been a bit more forgiving, but there is no excuse for leaving the blogger template pretty well as-is since 2002. Surely a web designer would rip that blogger headline bar out of the CSS template before uttering a word.. but I don’t think AJ’s main reason for blogging is the design at all. Like most personal blogs I think the reason for writing varies. Sometimes its to vent, sometimes to laugh, and sometimes its just to order ones own thoughts by writing them down.

AJ doesn’t hold back and doesn’t make any apologies for his wordy, sometimes fragmented raves. Some of his favorites are interesting and there some genuinely well written posts in there, but unless you get caught up in AJ’s world and his friends, the posts probably won’t entertain you for long. Not a bad effort overall and with a few loving touches to the CSS it could even be a little better. NULL

Eyes For Lies is a blog about a “wizard,” or one who has the innate ability to TELL if someone is telling a big fat goober of a fib.

Our author takes a look at big stories in the media where people are looked at closely, mostly murder mysteries or missing people cases, and she examines video to show points where she personally believes they are not being 100% truthful, or are downright lying.

I fell asleep on Monday at 7pm and woke up at 11, and couldn’t get back to sleep. I figured I’d come in here to find a blog to review and ended up reading Eyes for Lies until about 2:45 am when I had to force myself to stop and go to bed.

Admittedly, I love a good media sensationalism story and the media circus that surrounds a lot of the modern Whodunnits. Eyes for Lies takes events in the news from said media circuses in the form of video testimony and news reports… from JonBenet Ramsey to Natalie Holloway, from Anna Nicole to the Duke Rape Case, and really examines the people involved. She studies the the dead give-aways and so incredibly subtle the average bear would miss them clues that abound, and she interprets what SHE thinks is the truth.

The blog itself is a blogspot site, that links back to her official URL, and on occasion I lost myself trying to get back and forth between the blogspot site and her About and other pages inside the official site. It took me a little while to figure out the gianormous eyeball was the “home” button in the blog, but once I did the reading through the archives began to flow very easily.

Sometimes, Eyes for Lies states the painfully obvious, like Howard K. Stern is full of malarkey and Larry Birkhead is the baby daddy of Anna Nicole Smith’s little cherub. Like anyone didn’t KNOW that. That one was almost a “duh.” But she goes into other media cases that I didn’t even know about and really peels back the onion skin layers, asking why the person is chuckling at certain questions and explaining why that is a big ding-ding-ding revelation moment for her. She even at the early part of her blog (2004) has an entry about how she knows when her husband is telling a lie. God help the man if he just wants to go out and play poker with the boys. Heh.

The only real complaint I have about the blog is that on the less “superstar” kinds of cases she doesn’t start with a short blurb about who the person and the case are. I had no idea who Adam Saleh was, nor Daniel Wade Moore and Ryan Ferguson. I think that when she is writing about someone less stellar than say, Anna Nicole, a brief synopsis of the person and the case at the beginning of the entry would be helpful.

Eyes For Lies explains a lot about how she sees what she sees, gives the reader insight so they too can read a liar’s eyes and see their traits. She also takes time to show us her garden and tell us a beautiful story about her 20 year old tortoise shell kitty who passed away a few years back. All told, this is an interesting read, and I wonder if she thinks the whole Rosie/Elisabeth thing was staged or not. She invites readers to ask her questions about what is going on in the media and what her opinion is… perhaps I’ll drop her a line and ask this.

Because Eyes For Lies kept me up until ungodly and ugly hours of the morning, I shake a fist at her. And I give her a 3.5 rating. Adding the brief synopsis and posting a little more frequently would push things up a bit for this reviewer. In the meantime, I’ve bookmarked her to come back and see who else is a BFL.NULL

I wasn’t sure how a “Web 2.0 Directory” would qualify as a blog. But it turns out that the author has made his “Directory” a blog and not a directory at all.

The first thing I noticed was that the url for this site was a blogspot hosted site. I have nothing against blogs being on blogspot per say, but if you are going to have a site called “Web 2.0 Directory” I think it should be hosted at its own domain.

The design of the site is rather bland and boring. It has this massive header that tells us the site has been around since December of 2006 and is tracking all the new web sites out there. Ok that’s fine, but 33% of my screen for this header is not needed. The rest of the design is a standard 3 column layout with the content in the center. Nothing about this design says “Hi I am a directory”.

The posts are boring as all get out. In fact they don’t really do much of anything other than describe a website. Some of the descriptions are one sentence long which leads me to my next thought about this site.

The site screams it is a spam site. Or at the very least, set up to just generate money and not actually do anything for the reader. There are many little details that lead me to believe this. First the author had the max number of google ads on the site. In addition to those the author has a nice break down of categories and wouldn’t you believe that the Pay Per Post category has one of the most posted to categories?

In addition to that the author has at the end of every post a link to every single site that you can submit your URL to such as del.icio.us, digg and others. All in the hopes that people will link back to his site.

This site fails miserably at what it says it is. It is not a directory by any means. It isn’t even what one would call a “Web 2.0” site. I really think the author should say that the purpose of the site is just to make me money and that is it. I think a complete restructuring of the site is needed if he wants to keep using the “Web 2.0 Directory” as the name of his blog.

NULL

The Simplify Your Thoughts/New Age Spirituality blog has relatively few actual entries with written content. The look and feel of the site is simple. It is a wordpress driven blog with two columns, one for content and one for navigation. The About Us page is still filled with the default wordpress content. There are two months (July and August) where content was posted to this blog, and most of that is video or graphics with inspirational sentiments.

The entry on ‘What is Spirituality’ is the most interesting on the site, and everything pretty much that follows is what our Dean of Chapel in college would have referred to as “Pink Fluffies” — nice thoughts and good feelings but do they really get you anywhere in life? Not really.

I found the site to be dull and not very inspirational. I didn’t sit and watch each of the videos. I feel it is hardly fair to place a grade on this blog seeing as there isn’t much content. Perhaps if the blog owner builds some content over the course of a year, content similar to the philosophical discussion in the first entry, this would be a more interesting and uplifting blog to read.

I’m going to give it a 2.25 rating. I don’t hate the blog, just wish there was something more substantial here to read and learn and enjoy. But right now… not so much.NULL

“Awakening Sense” has the subtitle describing the blog as being “about waking up to our awakening process…sensing its pull.” Who awakens? Not us — but our inner selves. What is this awakening? Spiritual mostly, and more of a consciousness of being. Delving into the blog one can learn more about what our author believes “awakening” means, and how folks can reach for this greater sense of being.

The blog itself consists of a very basic layout. A large red banner with no graphic adorns the top of the page, and the title of the blog hyperlinks back to the home page at all times. The background of the blog is white, with two columns. Navigation on the far right and content on the left. Archives go back to September 2007, which isn’t that long ago, but there is plenty to read here as our author has posted frequently through the months.

There is very little in the navigation area as our author does not use blog apps or ads by Google. The site is refreshingly non-commercial and very uncluttered. And that is a beautiful thing.

My only criticism of the blog, even though I do love the basic simplicity, is that I find it lacking in a way. The web is a big, wonderful, interesting place… and I would love if the author provided links and resources and information outside of their own little realm on the web. Not sales information through ads by google or whathaveyou, but links to resources he/she finds help nurture his/her philosophy.

You will notice that I am using his/her and he/she as I refer to our author here. On the About page, our blog author outlines why he or she has decided to write anonymously. And in that anonymity, there is no detail as to whether the voice behind the blog is male or female. Not that it matters, it just makes it hard to point to the author with a proper pronoun so I’ll have to be forgiven for using the he/she kind of notation.

It is a little disappointing, this anonymity, because I would like to be informed more about who the individual is behind the thoughts and philosophy here. But I have to honor the decision, and thank the author for not creating a false persona behind which he/she hides. So many people either lie about who they are or create false identities to hide behind, so I have to give credit to the honesty shown here on the About page.

The content of the blog is very spiritual and reflective, but more of a guide to the reader than the author’s experience with the concepts of awakening him/herself. There are references to the many forms that god has taken across the realms of religious consciousness through history. I would recommend this blog to people who are interested in expanding their concepts of their inner self, their core being, and developing a stronger spiritual base.

I give the blog a 3.75 and am changing the category from “creative writing” to “personal.” I didn’t find any of the content to be of a “creative writing” kind of vibe, because I found it to be more of a self-help and personal feel, and we don’t have a religious/spiritual/self-help/philosophy kind of category. So personal it is. NULL