For me, only two of the blogs listed on the course website felt like communities: Post Secret and Overheard in New York. While I enjoyed looking over the more personal blogs, I was much more interested in the “community” ones. I feel that community blogs are on average more entertaining and have so much more to offer, if only because so many people are able to contribute to it.
Greek Tragedy was the first blog I went to, and I was sort of taken aback by how personal she was in her entries. She was talking about her friends that had just left, and how she felt without them. After reading more entries, I found that the mood was not always as somber as it was in the first post I read, but it still surprised me that someone could be as open as she was with their self and others. One aspect of the blog that I liked was the many pictures that it contained. Pictures, I found, add so much to a blog: they bring the blog above the impersonal/dull text-only web page.
All of the other “personal” blogs listed on the course website (My Boyfriend is a Twat, Dooce, Piehole, and Bellow) seemed to be very similar in content and style to Greek Tragedy: they were all personal, outlandish as times, and creatively decorated. To be honest, I was really not interested in what was being said on any of the sites, and quickly moved on.
A Google search for “political blogs” brought me a list of Forbes’ best political blogs (from 2004). From there, I went to Forbes’ best photo blogs, where I found Catherine Jamieson’s blog, one I feel everyone should visit regularly. Jamieson was diagnosed with AIDS in 1995, and has been taking amazing pictures of things that most people don’t notice. One of my favorite pictures of hers is one of an apple orchard in Nova Scotia.
At first, I think was caught my eye was the awesome picture Forbes list, but after reading Forbes' description of the blog, which mentions Jamieson’s story, I looked at the blog in a totally new way. We can learn so much from people with untreatable illnesses; I feel like often times such people have such a great outlook on life, an outlook that is really what we should all have. Jamieson began to notice the beauty in small things and was lucky enough to have the will to capture the beauty she saw and share it with others.
I know I will bookmark her blog, and look at it as often as I can. And I think you should, too.
1 comment:
i really have to agree with you on the whole community blog appeal. that's why i liked overheard in new york so much--you DO have so many people contributing to it, adding to it, enhancing it, that it just becomes this collective quote book that just happens to be hilarious.
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