Entry #1 Only some blogs are cool

    Blogs aren't something that have ever interested me a ton, and I only find myself looking at them if I am using one as a source for a research paper. After looking at a couple for this blog I can definitely see how they could interest people because just by clicking around a few blogs I learned information about things I didn't even know existed, like the 'One Chip Challenge'. WHile you can learn a lot of new things from blogs, much of this information is trivial and will most likely be forgotten within the week. One thing I do appreciate is how much different blogs vary in terms of structure, topics, and tone. Of course, which blogs someone likes is going to depend on their personal interests and I understand that I am probably not the target audience for most blogs. That being said I want to talk about a few blogs and why I did or didn't like them.

    The first post I want to talk about is one that I personally was not a fan of. It is a blog from TMZ titled "'One Chip Challenge' Company pulls chip from stores after teens death," and it discusses a teenage boy in Michigan who passed away after eating one of these chips at school. The main issue I had with this blog was the way it was structured. There were too many pictures in my opinion, which distracted from the actual news story. There were only 2-3 sentences between each picture and most of them were of the chip or the brand, which quickly became repetitive. Another thing I didn't like about this blog was the lack of new information. There was a total of 7 paragraphs and only the last 2 presented any kind of new information that wasn't already stated in the title. While I appreciate the title being so direct, it gives away almost all of the information and makes reading the whole blog kind of useless. https://www.tmz.com/2023/09/07/paqui-pulls-one-chip-challenge-stores-teenager-dies/

    The second blog I read I felt mostly indifferent about, but it had some good qualities. The blog was from the Huffington Post and was titled "Kelly Osborn Isn't Entertaining Anyone's Plastic Surgery Speculations,". I feel like this blog did a much better job with the structure and spacing of it compared to the first blog. The ratio of text to pictures was perfect as it had 2 pictures, one at the beginning and one in the middle, and had a decent but overwhelming amount of text. The blog presented ew information that was not already stated in the title and had a few direct quotes from Kelly Osborn. There was not anything particularly bad about this blog, it was well written, but it was boring in my opinion. Objectively, it is a good blog, and I am sure some people really liked it, but I am definitely not the target audience for it.https://www.huffpost.com/entry/kelly-osbourne-denies-plastic-surgery_n_64f9e927e4b01ea7ad4fc994

    I genuinely enjoyed the last blog I read. It was from business insider and was titled "Ikaria, Greece, is One of the World's Blue Zones Where People Longer than Average. Residents Nap Often, Drink Herbal Tea, and Value Family,". This blog was a little bit different from the others in structure because it was formatted as a list. This was the longest blog of the three, but it also held the most information. There were a lot of pictures, but unlike the TMZ blog, they didn't feel overwhelming. Each point that was made was accompanied by a single picture, which visually broke up the blog so that you could focus on one point at a time. This blog talked about the lifestyle of the people living in Ikaria, Greece, and the possible reasons why they live so long. Overall there were 6 points, 5 of those being possible reasons why they live so long, and under each heading was a few short paragraphs. In those paragraphs the blog explains what the point is in further detail and either how the people carry out that point, or a statistic about it. For example, one of the points made is that they often take afternoon naps and under this point the blog includes a study that indicates a link between daytime napping and a slower rate of brain shrinkage. It gave enough information to be interesting but not so much that it was intimidating to read. This was the only blog out of the three that I felt "satisfied" after I read it. https://www.insider.com/ikaria-greece-blue-zone-and-its-longevity-secrets-2023-9