Blog Review (Group) and Personal (Clayton Peppler)

We chose to review the blog mentalfloss.com. With a scale of 1-10, we would rate this blog an 8. We really enjoyed how easy it was to navigate the website, the content of the blog, the presentation and the wide array of interactive material.

The navigation of the blog was not only simplistic but intuitive. We really liked how it had a site map with all the main categories listed. We also liked that if you could not find what you were looking on the site map, there was a search box.

The content of the blog was very interesting and applicable to everyday life. The content varies from movies to money to interesting new technology. The presentation was “calendar” style and was executed extremely well. Each square had a short synopsis of the topic and if you like what you read you could click the square and it would link you to the full article. This style created an organized and clutter free blog. Each post had at least one image and each image was relevant to the topic.

Our favorite part of the blog was probably that it was more than just written posts. The blog incorporated things such as videos, quizzes and an “amazing fact generator”. We felt that these added extras made the blog more desirable than the others and more likely to keep us returning for more.

One thing that we would change about the blog to give it that 10/10 rating would be to reduce the amount of advertisements. We also think that the frequency of the posts could be reduced as it seems that they were posting four or more times a day. We feel that posting this many times a day makes the blog too busy.

Mentalfloss.com (Clayton Peppler)

Out of 10, I would rate this blog an 8 based on the following criteria:

Recurring Themes: 10

-       The blog has different categories that they post to each week, creating reoccurring themes.

Author Voice: 8

-       Because there are many different authors, you get a sense of different voices and perspectives which really livens up the blog. Some authors work is more enjoyable to read than others.

Multimedia: 10

-       There is always an image or a video in the blog post and that image/video always pertains to the content of the post itself.

“Good” Writing: 9

-       When looking through a couple of the posts, the errors seemed to be nonexistent.

Frequency: 7

-       This blogs posts four or more times a day. I find this to be excessive and creates too busy of a blog.

Credibility: 10

-       All of the work that is taken from other sources is cited.

Organization: 10

-       I really like the calendar style that this blog follows. I found that this style creates a flowing, organized and clutter free blog.

Use of Advertisements: 5

-       I really do not like how many advertisements are on the blog. On a couple of the posts an ad would pop up right in the middle of the reading.

-Clayton Peppler, Emily LeMasters and Elizabeth Victorio

Photo From: http://www.otoons.com/eso/floss.htm#sthash.z8RBBRFV.dpbs