For this assignment I chose to search for blogs about travel on technorati.com. I found a blog called "Traveling In Europe: The Joys of Living in Europe." The blogger is Robert Rapier, and in his bio about himself he does not mention anything about the blog or the purpose for it. To find the purpose and reason for this blog, you have to go back to the archives page to the first ever blog post. Once there, I found out that in 1999-2001 Rapier and his family lived in Germany, and they received six weeks each year for vacation benefits. He goes on to say that the purpose of this blog is to write about the experience they had all around Europe and North Africa, and that he hopes it will help readers who are interested in planning a trip to Europe.
As I went through his blog posts that started in 2006, I read that at one point his family and himself actually left Germany and moved to Scotland. It seems to me that this blog was more for fun, than for professionalism. I spent a good amount of time going through his posts, and I did find things I liked and disliked. I liked how he really was telling his personal story through his writing. He wrote about how they visited and lived many places, and what his experience was in each place. His blog seems more of a personal account of his everyday life in Europe compared to an actual informative/travel guide to famous sites/sight-seeing. I think his purpose of the blog had good intentions, but I do not think it is being completely fulfilled. With that all being said, I did really like how he had his own photography with every blog posts. I did not like that there were only pictures and text however, I wish there were videos of some sort or more pictures rather than just one or two small photos for every post. The ratio of writing to a photo was a little over powering. I did not like how he had a lot of text compared to other forms of media. To a reader, I do not think it looks that appealing. I also did not like how color less the blog was. I think he should add some color and use different texts/formats just to make things stand out and spruce it up a bit. I also noticed how he has not posted since November 7th, 2010 which means the blog has been forgotten or he ran out of stories! I also noticed how he did use tags and links to try to get more traffic on the blog which was a good idea. However he has gotten little traffic I believe, just because there are very little comments on each post. He also mentions in his last blog post, that the title of his blog is now irrelevant because he has been posting about places outside of Europe. That is something I did not like because he should not say he should change the title, he should actually change the title so it is not misleading.
I found some other travel blogs while stumbling upon this one. I found one called http://www.traveling-savage.com/ and it is put together very nicely. It has a lot of pictures, good amount of readers, and is very appealing! If Rob ever wants to spruce up his blog and increase traffic, this one would be a great one to look at for ideas! That is all I have for now, I hope you enjoyed my blog critique!
To visit Robert Rapier's blog: http://traveling-in-europe.blogspot.com/
-Holly Cannon
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