Category: Uncategorized

Not another Dating Angst Blog was an interesting blog. I read through every post to date. It is a fairly new blog and I did not anticipate it having much content. I was not sure exactly what to expect for I didn’t know the meaning of angst. I did look it up and it simply means “existentialist dread.” I am not sure if this blog actually fits the description of the title. Another interpretation of the title is: “philosophical movement centered on individual existence.” Interesting enough I do feel the blog read more like a series of short stories.

The blog is simply about Joseph’s dating experiences. The topics covered so far are three girls: Laura, Ali, and a girl he had a 23 hour relationship with. He takes you for a walk through his relationships starting when he was 12 until the present. He is currently 21 and in college. So far all of his relationships he discusses are High School sweethearts. He tells a story about, Laura, a girl whom he practically drooled over for many years when all it came down to was him being put out to pasture. I would have to say I truly felt sorry for the guy, knowing the feeling of being shy and not wanting to specifically say the dreaded words: “would you like to date me?” He is currently just starting his discussion on Ali and I anticipate a lot more to come with this relationship. It appears that he learned from his first relationship and is not sure what to do at the moment.

The site has a very simple design. It has a pale yellow background with red and black text. I really liked his Title Banner, I felt it gave the site a personal feeling. He also has a picture of him on the site and a link to his blogger profile. On the right hand side, he has the same common links for blogs: recent posts, favorite posts, highlighted posts, and links to other sites.

I would say that this blog was interesting to say the least and some of the other readers of his site left comments about how good of a job he was doing describing his relationships. I feel there needs to be some more content, which I am sure he is preparing. His posts were well developed and read like a story. This blog is young, it only started in December of 2005, but it has been updated regularly. I feel his site is more of a personal reflection site. If you like reality TV shows or teen magazines, this blog might be for you. I rate this blog as a 3.75 for it does have a well developed theme and good posts using proper grammar and spell check, but I feel it needs more posts. It is still young and has great potential.
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When I heard the name Inquire Within I wasn’t sure what I would
expect. This could be any number of things for a blog from job
searches to random thoughts to well just about anything. The title of
the blog is so non-descriptive that I was forced to go to the site
just to figure out what the name of the site meant.

Once I hit the site I still had no clue why the author chose to name
the blog inquire within. There is a little blurb that says “Like
Bob’s discount furniture but without the discount. Or the furniture.
Or Bob.” This was funny, but still doesn’t help in the matter of
figuring out what is with the name.

The design of the blog is a 3 column layout with a nice banner. The
banner is of a walkway or road lined with trees on either side and is
in black and white. Again, it doesn’t give me any idea as to the name
of the blog. The left column has links to all things external (with
the exception of the archives) and the right column has links to
things internal, books, and well more external things.

The blog itself is your standard blog. Near daily updates about what
is going on in the author’s life. The author is a law student who
studied in Boston and is currently in a 4 month program in London. I
can assume that he will probably become a good lawyer since his
attention to detail in his posts is pretty precise and I think that
would transfer over.

My only downside with this blog is the earlier posts are more
enjoyable than the later posts. I found myself bored with the more
recent posts. Not to say they aren’t good, but something is missing
and I don’t know what it is. The earlier posts gave me the light and
energy that someone new to blogging brings and with time they have
dimmed a bit.

I would go read this blog if I were you. And by read, I mean read.
Its not a “skim and know” type blog. It is a read and know type. I
found this site very enjoyable and I think most people will too.NULL

Tell Me Why? is the title of a series of books I had growing up in the early 70s. There were three or four books in the series, and I have one of them on my bookshelf today. As a child, I greatly enjoyed the books, and to this day remember looking out the window of the car as we drove through the night knowing why the moon was following us, all thanks to the “Tell Me Why?” books.

The blog “Tell Me Why?” is not from the same publishing company as the educational resource books of my childhood but the mission behind the blog is quite the same. Authored by an “R. Edmondson,” Tell Me Why? happily answers the little questions we all have in life, such as “Why do people burp?” and “How deep is the ocean?” The site is an easy to read and navigate blogger template, and there is little or no difficulty in getting around. R. Edmondson does not state where he’s from or how he knows all of these things, which immediately triggers suspicion on my part as a parent and a former educator.

Going back through the archives, I noticed that the October 2006 entries were put into place to establish the top level navigation topics such as Links and FAQs pages, as well as a page for webmasters to set up affiliate sites. The site is set up as an educational site, but really is a site for generating cash through affiliates and yahoo ads. Every entry has a yahoo ads section. Children who are unfamiliar with the internet will possibly be confused by why the yahoo ads are there in the first place on EVERY single entry.

Additionally, when one is looking at a site like Tell Me Why? and desires to research the topic further, one enjoys links to other resources. R. Edmondson provides links to Universal Facts, a website he also manages. There aren’t any links out to NASA or NOAA, or websites from which students should be obtaining primary source material. If I were currently an educator, I wouldn’t mind a student using Tell Me Why? to get ideas started for a paper, but doubt I would accept it as a primary source for my students’ research. The site encourages people to link to it. It would also be helpful if it linked to other sites outside of the R. Edmondson universe.

R. Edmondson states he has written all of the articles inside “Tell Me Why?”, and I have to believe he is the absolute font of all knowledge in the universe because I don’t see any sourcing for the information he presents. I find any website that does not source its content to be suspect in some way, shape or form. Additionally, there wasn’t no source information for the graphics used. As someone with a degree in technology education, I find that suspect and a not very careful way to present a site that expects other people not to infringe upon his own copyright.

Because it is fun to learn trivial things even into your 40s and because no one is giving me a scholarship to a major university based upon this “research paper,” I have to say that the content of the site was interesting enough to entertain me on a cold and rainy New England day. I give “Tell Me Why?” a 3 rating, and would encourage R. Edmondson to source his work a little better and reveal more of who he is and upon what authority he writes. That way, I can feel comfortable seeing my kids use his site to learn something.
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I changed the category for Hormones-Beauty-Health to Business. This is a marketing site run by an affiliate for a company (http://www.ihdistribution.com), and in their own words they are “a progressive distributor of women’s healthcare and beauty products.”

Progressive? Like Moveon.org? Progressive like Liberals leaving the democratic party because it is too conservative? Good gracious I hate the overuse of the word “progressive” all across the globe these days. I’m not sure what makes them “progressive.” They certainly aren’t “radical” or “revolutionary.” At least they don’t come across to me in any way that could match up with a definition of progressiveness.

Anyway — the Hormones-Beauty-Health website is filled with feature articles on Women’s Health Care, from Skin care (adult acne, aging, post-menopausal problems) to general health care (stress, eating disorders, post-partum depression)and Emu Oil…. which I believe is something they really are into at Hormones-Beauty-Health.

The site is a gentle pinkish brown and white with standard blue underlined links in the Arial font. It is very easy to navigate, very light on graphics, and truly an “informational” site with dozens of articles on all kinds of health, hormonal and beauty topics.

In their top bar navigation (which is dark pink text on light pink background, slightly hard to read on my flat-screen monitor so i had to punch up the contrast a bit) there is a blog category so I went there to see what was being blogged.

It is a WordPress driven blog, header banner with standard two column layout. The colors of the banner are completely different than that of the marketing site. I would suggest html code of “target=blank” off of the Hormones-Beauty-Health page to launch people out of the marketing site and open up a new window for a page so completely different in scope than the rest of the site.

This page is located at http://www.hormones-beauty-health.com/wordpress/ for those following along at home. It is an easy to read and navigate blog, with somewhat repetitive information from the Hormones-Beauty-Health main page. There is an entry examining other blogs and their popularity, links to a favorite blog or two, some free recipes from a “sponsor” (which strangely enough links back to a sub-page in Hormones-Beauty-Health).

The “about” page inside the blog still holds the original WordPress content for ‘this is your about page, you can write here about yourself.’ I highly suggest that be edited because it looks silly to leave that with the default content.

The blog site is very simple and easy to navigate. The header banner is much nicer than the header for the marketing site at Hormones-Beauty-Health.

Blog archives go back to December 2005 but there is mostly one blog entry for the each of the first several months of the blog’s existence. It seems that the blog is now being used more often to promote the main corporate site as the recent months have a lot more content. The earlier months’ content seems to be repeated in some way on the Tips page for the main marketing site of Hormones-Beauty-Health and so I’m wondering — why blog at all if everything is over on the marketing site?

Everything seems cyclical and points back to the main page eventually. I think this is all a big online marketing site for people to get some advice on psoriasis or other skin and aging issues so they can buy … Arbonne! There are links to the skin care company Arbonne within blog entries as another “sponsor” to ihd.myarbonne.com. We know from the beginning About page in the main site that IHD is the progressive affiliate for another company, obviously Arbonne International.

Everyone I know right now is selling Arbonne. They want me to host parties and will give me 300 dollars off or free shipping to everyone who orders from my party… all my friends are trying to climb an inner corporate ladder to become regional sales manager or district sales director for Arbonne.

None of them have a webpage.

Overall, the tips and advice are interesting. Everyone is trying to make money on the internet, and Arbonne is a growing business. Our blog author is using the web to promote his/her business and hopefully drum up some sales. I wish him/her the best of luck.

I have no real intention of revisiting the blog, but the Hormones-Beauty-Health page did have some good content that I may refer back to. I give the site a 2.75 rating. NULL

I enjoy travel stories. I like when people tell me tales of interesting places they’ve been that are off the beaten path and not exactly something you’d see in a commercial on TV. One of my favorite series of TV programs ever are the BBC travel documentaries with Michael Palin and his many adventures bopping round the globe on a rather grandiose scale. Documentaries like “Hemingway’s Travels,” “Pole to Pole,” “Sahara” and “Round the World in 80 Days” feature his incredible wit, his open mindedness towards other cultures, and spectacular visuals shot with motion and still cameras.

I watch those programs and own the accompanying BBC published photo book and journals that the Beeb publishes to support the broadcast editions. But I think I’ve found my new Michael Palin. In fact, I bet Michael Palin would be awfully proud of this adventure and this travelogue.

14degrees is the story of Mr. Robert Thomson, a New Zealander living and working in Japan at Asia Pacific University, who decided to embark on a journey around the world. On a bike. And not just any old bike… a recumbent bike. Recumbent bikes are the ones where you’re sitting upright with your legs out in front of you pedaling away.

He outlines his reasoning and his route, he has an FAQ page which mostly deals with the bike itself. He has a flickr generated photo gallery and many videos of his adventures on the road. Primarily, the core of the content of the site exists inside the blog section. The blog begins in February of 2006 with him setting up the planning and purchase of the bike and discussion of whether or not he will need a PDA, and finishing up his work in Japan. He outlines the gear he will be taking along, and sets out on the journey in July of 2006 after training and getting used to the recumbent bike.

For the better part of the blog, he shares photos as often as possible. The first several weeks have very short English updates and long and involved Japanese updates, which disappointed me greatly. That is the only thing I find at fault with the blog… that I have no clue what he’s discussing for that period of time. The photos alone are interesting and kept me moving into the next months, where the English updates are more dominant and the Japanese versions dwindle…

Readers also get to witness his beard grow! He eventually shaves it off, but another Michael Palin reference comes to mind with the long shaggy beard and the “It’s Man” intro to the Monty Python episodes where Palin is a castaway and a hairy wreck. Thomson never looks THAT incredibly wooly, but certainly does farm quite the chin-blanket for several months.

I was most impressed with the stories of his finding places to sleep for free along his journey… abandoned places, monasteries, fields, people’s homes, and how through places like Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Azerbaijan and other -jans and -stans he manages not only to remain safe, but finds people who are kind, loving, supportive. He finds some nasty bureaucracy and huge flaming hoops of stupid to ride his bike through too as he deals with crossing from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, but he survives the frustrations and comes out on the other side a man with a bike and some snow to ride through.

Rob shipped his bike home in June and is now using a skateboard to traverse the globe. Take THAT Mr. Palin! As of this writing, Robert is in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean heading to the United States of America, where he will take a southerly route across the US and possibly Mexico on his longboard. If successful in his boarding across North America, he claims he’ll be the first person to do so, unassisted. And that’s worthy of a BBC special and a book, with introduction penned by Mr. Palin himself I think.

I am giving this blog a 4.5 rating, the .5 drop is for the stuff I can’t read in Japanese (sorry Robert…) and am greatly looking forward to his USA leg of the journey.

I hope that people here are as kind to him as the people on the steppes of central Asia, and that he finds kindness, care and comfort at the hands of my countrymen. I know sleeping out in the open or in abandoned buildings is not as easy here as it probably was in Eastern Europe, but he’s got Couchsurfing.com as an option and I’m sure he will meet people on the road who will take him in.

I greatly enjoyed reading the blog to this point and cannot wait to see what he has lined up in the US. I wish he was heading to Boston instead of areas south of here… I’d like to shake this man’s hand and offer up a futon for him to sleep on.

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