BloggingBlogs #3

Terrorism-news

I stumbled upon this one by hitting the "Next Blog" button and immediately noticed that it was a textbook, old-fashioned, one-and-only, filter. The entire blog focused on one subject, news about terrorism. Entry length varied from a paragraph to almost a dozen paragraphs (albeit short), each with a link to the source where the maintainer found the information. It's a straight-forward blog, with a layout very similar to an online news site, that picks out the stories of the day, usually about 2 or 3, and gives a summarized description along with the opinions of the maintainers to get some comments going. There is a very neat, professional organization about the weblog, each entry having a picture or map at the top and the corresponding link to the original source of information at the bottom.

The maintainers, there's two I believe, definately are trying to create and maintain a certain reputation, which looks to be doing very well. There's a really neat geographical representation of the amount and location of every visitor to the blog. More than 4500 people have visited this blog from all over the world in the past 3 days! There's another neat little sidebar doodad that is a ticker of how much the war in Iraq is costing. I'm not sure if that's a worldwide total or just for the United States, but there's a link below offering more information on the cost calculator. There are even cartoons, related to terrorism and the president of course, spread throughout the blog, which gives it some variety and dimension.

BloggingBlogs #2

Lulu's "Daily Nooz"

A very simple blog done by a woman, not sure of the age, but the things she posts are actually kind of interesting. All of the posts consist of little snippets of interesting information, mostly from newspapers and magazines along with quotes from television shows. There aren't many links, which is a little surprising, but when thought about further makes sense. If these snippets were found in the newspaper hardcopy, it would be a real pain in the ass to try to find the corresponding web page with the article. On the other hand, if the articles were found online, their location would likely change and eventually disappear because of archiving and age or relevance.

I find this blog very difficult to categorize, but the intent seems to be just a collection of eye-catching, humorous, and interesting short news articles from sources such as National Geographic, World Weekly News, and several others. The only reputation I think this person wants is to be known for a source of quirky facts and trivia. I like it. There are a lot of entries and I found it very easy to get hooked on reading all of them in one sitting. I'm going to have to call this one a weblog with a hint of a filter. I think it's a weblog because of the number and length, many, many and short, entries and also because there are only a few links sprinkled throughout the entire blog. I recommend the site this gal's boyfriend is actually pretty darn funny. At first the blog seemed very impersonal and distant, but the more I read, the more I started to see the maintainer's personality along with a pattern of the types of entries. There were very few personal entries, but they're there.

BloggingBlogs #1

jackobob

"I am so much looking forward to the Nokia N80, after being disappointed by not buying the 7650 and getting the lame 3650 instead on an 18 month lock-in contract. I'm going to count down to my new phone on this weblogA cell phone." One of the weirdest reasons I can think of to create a blog, but I'm sure there are weirder ones out there. The Blog of Jack O'Roberts is all about the Nokia N80 and nothing else. Seriously, it's all about the phone, which, by the way, hasn't even come out yet according to Jack.

His is a very simple blog, no pictures and only a couple of links. He's got quite a few postings though I must say. A lot for just a phone. Judging by the style of writing, none intended or thought out I'm sure, I'd say he's typing as he's thinking. I must note that he is probably fairly new to blogs because the dates for his blog are off by a few days. I would categorize this blog as a weblog, bordering on notebook because of the length of the blogs being reasonably short (how much can you say about a cell phone?) Each entry is basically either a statement about some feature of the phone or Jack answering his own questions about his phone. I could see this site easily becoming a filter by implanting links to his sources of information as well as Nokia's site.

It's very straightforward why he created this blog and that is keep track of his thoughts and anticipation of the Nokia N80 phone, nothing more, nothing less. Plain and simple. I can't really pull much else from his blog other than he must be just out of high school or college because he mentioned once something about not being a student anymore. I keep thinking to myself "Why did he make a blog about a cell phone?" My reasoning is that he just wanted a quick, easy place to keep track of his thoughts. I don't really think he intended to have any sort of audience (Would you want to read it?), there are no comments to any of his postings. This one really makes me scratch my head...

Blogging Other Students Blogs #3

For my third and final bloggging blog, I chose Jessica Hahn's blog, Jessica's Basket of Apples. She was in my Intermediate Writing class last semester so there was a little familiarity with her writing.
She definately has a variety of topics she talks about. It seems random, but that's what I like about it. There's no real direction I can see...yet, but that's just fine. I'm really interested to see what else she's going to add later on. There's also a very unique style of writing she has. It seems she isn't putting on any sort of mask like some people do when they create something online. Honesty is the best policy and I feel Jessica's blog reflects this credo very well.

Blogging Other Students Blogs #2

The second fellow student's blog I chose to blog was {imagispasm}. The name of his blog, again, I'm assuming that this author is a male, was what caught my attention. Imagination + Orgasm = Imagispasm. Genius.
Upon reaching the blog, I was surprised at the style the author had chosen to write his blog; in pirate-talk. My first thought was "Holy crap, this must've taken a lot of energy and time to translate all of this." But then I thought, "Maybe this person has done this before," and I recalled in the movie Dodgeball the character Steve the Pirate being a possible source for the style. Either way I found the posts to be fun and entertaining to read plus the topics were interesting to me.
Imagispasm's blog was mostly a notebook/journal where he talked about daily activities and nuances. There were a couple entries blogging other blogs and not the ones assigned for homework in our class. Another interesting thing about his blog was that his template was completely complimentary of his style of writing. A really cool feature he has on his site is the status of the moon. It makes me wonder what kind of other little things one could add to their sidebar to add individuality and uniqueness to their blog. I thought it was great.

Blogging Other Students Blogs #1

The first blog I decided to blog was Snapdragon's.
I'm not exactly sure why I chose her, I'm assuming it's a female that created this blog and I could be wrong, but random eenie-miny-moe selection seemed to work.
The first couple of blog posts weren't the most interesting, but I think this is probably due to the blog being Snapdragon's first and I understand the sparseness. My blog isn't anything near interesting yet and I'm a newbie as well. As I continued reading, her entries became more interesting, I even clicked on one of the links because it piqued my interest so (See Green Tea).
I only noticed a few spelling/punctuation/grammar errors in Snapdragon's weblog. For some reason I have a really good/bad habit of catching them, but I'll have to rant about that in a blog on my own page sometime.
Overall I thought Snapdragon's selection of topics to blog were interesting and although there weren't a whole lot, I expect the patterns of the topics she chooses to blog to continue and accumulate over time.