Blog Review Essay: Introduction

In attempting to answer the question "what makes for a good blog," I chose three blogs that at first glance appear to be very popular: The Book of the Gear, This Is Not My Life, and PeterDavid.net. All three of these blogs address different things and appeal to different people. PeterDavid.net is a personal blog that deals not only with the author's works and proffession, but also with American politics. This Is Not My Life also serves as a personal blog at times, but this is overshadowed by the author's use of the blog for film and book reviews, as well as written parodies of such. Finally, The Book of the Gear is used solely as a vector for a serial fiction storyline.

Despite this disparity in content, however, it is possible to identify a few common elements among them that make them popular or "good" blogs. It is also possible to determine what makes an unpopular blog, both through missteps of these three and through what they omit or avoid.

A final note: I conform to the convention on the Internet of reffering in text to other sites by how they reffer to themselves, regardless of percieved errors in syntax, grammar, etc. Thus, The Book of the Gear will be reffered to with the middle two prepositions in lower-case lettering, while This Is Not My Life will be reffered to with all words capitalized.

On to Part 1.