Occasionally someone leaves a comment here asking whether there are qualifications to be a reviewer, or if "just any [insert epithet here] can do it."
I love this question, because it assumes that there is a big glut of reviewers out there fighting to review a limited supply of blogs. In fact, there are only a couple dozen people who are willing to do regular reviews, while at last count there are around 300 blogs waiting to be reviewed. At three per week, it will take 2 years just for us to get caught up. So in answer to your question, Mr. PhD in Blog Criticism, yes, any idiot/moron/jerk can be a reviewer.
What would you have me do, interview prospective reviewers? "I see that you frequently comment on the consistency of your wife's gravy, and often tell people waiting in line at the movie theater which films to avoid. Very impressive. Expect a call in 2 or 3 weeks."
And who the hell appointed
me to this job? Shouldn't someone determine whether
I'm qualified to determine whether reviewers are qualified? And someone will need to qualify
them, of course. Maybe the U.S. Supreme Court. Nobody questions any decisions they make.
Look, I'm just a guy with a website. It happens to be the website that comes up first on Google when you type in "humor blogs." That may mean something to you or it may not.
I've managed to scrabble together a group of people who are willing to look over a few blogs a week and write up their thoughts. And I've managed to find a few extraordinarily helpful souls to make sense of these comments and post them here. We're all volunteers, and our opinions mean as much or little as you want. The composition of the reviewer "staff" isn't constant from one blog to the next, and after a while the reviewers tend to get jaded because, frankly, most blogs are crap. Sometimes the reviewers are grumpy. Sometimes they have ulterior motives. Sometimes we catch the blogger on a bad week, when they weren't feeling particularly funny or creative.
And sometimes there's a perfect storm of grumpiness, as with this review. Rickey's a bit of a misanthrope, which I find equally entertaining and off-putting. Our reviewers, evidently tired of mediocre blogs, either didn't get his shtick, got it and didn't care for it, or just didn't feel like putting in the effort. So they weren't in the best of moods.
The Frogster, who was assigned to summarize these grumpy reviews of this grumpy blog, is sick. And grumpy. He's tired of reviewers grousing about stupid little incidental features of a blog while refusing to trouble themselves to read more than two paragraphs in a row. He's tired of reviewers making contradictory criticisms, not to mention committing all manner of grammatical and spelling errors while snarking about a blogger's writing style.
And frankly I'm a little grumpy too -- about commenters bitching about the quality of blog reviewers, and people complaining about the scoring algorithm I use, and reviewers who give a blog all 2's without so much as a "Sorry, not really my thing."
So maybe we all just need to get it out of our systems.
When I first read the Frogster's review of Rickey's blog, I laughed my ass off. I thought, "Man, there is no WAY I can use this." But then I thought, what the hell. If the reviewers can dish it out, then they can take it.
It's only fair, of course, that I subject the Frogster to my own criticism while he is criticizing the reviewers criticizing Rickey, who is criticizing everything else. I can only hope that Rickey writes a follow-up post telling me what an idiot I am for the way I handled this review. Then the circle will be complete.
So, now that I've completely lost our ADD readers, here's the Frogster's review of Rickey's blog, along with my own commentary.
----------------------------
The Frogster here. I'm sick. I've had some kind of flu thing for almost a week and I'm grouchy. That may increase my grouchiness about reviews. But I am grouchy. It might just be my luck, but I have gotten reviews for a number of blogs in a row with an awful lot of whining. According to the list of reviewers, some of them are people who visit and comment on my blog. So, by calling them out I run the risk of someone deciding they hate me and taking me off their links or never visiting my blog again. Oh well.
I know that funny is in the eye of the beholder, but for crying out loud. We're not awarding the Nobel Prize in Literature, people.
Now then. I have no relationship with Rickey other than the comments we occasionally leave on one another's blogs. I would not recognize Rickey if I saw him on the street. I even scolded Rickey once for dropping an F-bomb on my blog (when you see my blog on the main page here, it has a smiley face with a little hat on. That means no F-bombs, please). But I have to go on a bit of a rant with regard to these reviews, for the sake of my mental health. I shall now review Rickey's reviewers.
| Category | Score | Points |
| Content | 4.55 | 32/70 |
| Writing | 5.64 | 3/5 |
| Web Design | 4.36 | 2/5 |
| Intangibles | 4.45 | 2/5 |
| Read Regularly | 1.82 | 2/10 |
| Frequency | 8 | 4/5 |
| Total |
| 45 |
Percentile Rank: 13Meh. It was okay, but nothing I'd come back to.
Thanks for that in-depth review, Capote. Rickey should be able to make good use of your constructive criticism there. Maybe you should try texting. It looks as though typing tires you out.
Eh...I kind of feel bad. But, as hard as I would try, I couldn't make myself read any more of it. Maybe it's just not my style of humor because I felt like I just didn't get it. I did like his use of photographs, though.
This is fine. Humor is subjective. This reviewer said it wasn't his thing, and he will probably take a point off Rickey's score because of it. Fair enough.
Again, I think that you should have a "maybe" on the would you read this blog scale. (Give me a break. Make up your mind, already. It's a yes or no question. Either you're coming back or you're not. Do you need more time to think about it? Do you want me to ask you again in 3 weeks? Should I hold your hand in the mean time? Can I speak to your supervisor? If I gave people the option to say 'maybe,' people would say 'maybe' 75% of the time, when what they mean is, 'No.' So just freaking say NO already. - Diesel) Because when I first came to Ricky's blog, and oh my god does he remind you that he is Ricky through the ENTIRE blog, I thought "YAWN." He talked about football predictions and creating a banner. Not funny. But then I got down to some of his political posts and they were thoughtful AND funny. So I started thinking, "this guy has promise." But overall, I dont' think I'd go back just because it took me awhile to get into it.
Awhile is an adverb, Faulkner. You meant "A while." And, in a somewhat ironic twist, you spelled "Ricky" wrong- it should be "Rickey." After seeing all of the "Rickey's" you are bitching about, you think you would have at least spelled it correctly. Nicely done. Which DMV office employs someone with your particular set of gifts?
Geez, Froggy. Take some Sudafed and maybe some morphine already. Evidently you missed the fact that "Rickey," being the genius he is, misspelled his own name in the blog url. And I guess you also missed the post where Rickey pointed out said fact. So much for your eye for detail, eh? - DieselI have to say, I give a lot more leeway to sites that post every day, because THAT IS SUCH A CHORE. Ricky posted every day this week. So for that, I say, YAH RICKY!
I agree. Daily posting is too much work for me.
Despite my concern he has a mental disorder I like the blog.
Yeah, he probably does have mental disorder, but I think you could say the same about most bloggers.
I don't think this blog is meant to be funny. It has a lot of serious stuff in it.
You're right. Rickey was trying to put his blog up at horror-blogs but he mistyped it and it accidentally got shipped over to humor-blogs. DUH! HA HA! That silly Rickey! Psst! Maybe we should email him and let him know about his little "whoopsie." It's really, really, really kind of you to point that out. Boy, maybe we can put this whole embarrassing episode behind us.
The posts are too long, didn’t even smile once. One of my personal pet peeves is when people refer to themselves in the third person and do so throughout the post. Like nails on chalkboard for me.
Speaking of too long, your first sentence is a run-on, Hemingway. You should split it in twain. "The posts are too long PERIOD CAPITAL I didn't even smile once." Also, you meant "Nails on
A chalkboard," I presume. Rickey could probably tighten up his post length by eliminating things like conjunctions and pronouns- maybe then you could struggle through a post.
You know what bugs me? People who use a single dash to join two independent clauses. - DieselWhile I wouldn't read this blog regularly, it's not bad. The writing is good, the humor is there but it's just not my kind of read. On top of that, who the hell is Rickey and why should I care? I even went back to the first post of the blog to try and find out. Nothing. I'm not about to root around in all those posts to find out either. I can't tell if it's someone talking about a guy named Rickey or if Rickey's talking about himself in the third person. I feel like I've walked into the middle of something and I just don't get it. As for the design, nothing to complain about. Simple, easy to read, aside from the neverending scroll of posts, it's nice to look at.
I think it's fairly obvious who Rickey is from his posts. Would a long biography help? Oh, but that would piss off Anonymous Reviewer #6 above, unless he made it funny.
I had no idea who Rickey was. To me, "Rickey Henderson" sounds like the 12-year old retarded kid who rides his bike up and down the streets in your neighborhood offering to show people his bottle cap collection. I see a picture of a baseball player in the lower right. But then I also see pictures of purple cows on a lot of peoples' sites. Am I to assume that the writer is pretending to be a purple cow? - DieselI couldn't surf away from this blog fast enough. Sports, Politics, ACH. And yes, both of those topics could be funny? But in reality, are only funny if Jon Stewart is talking.
We use the question mark to ask a question in the English language, Steinbeck. You are not asking a question in your third "sentence." This makes me think you are the kind of person who makes every statement into a question, you know? Both of Comedy Central's news spoof shows SUCK without their writers, you feel me? Plus, in your fourth sentence, you should stick something in front of the "are," aight? Geez. Would you prefer it if Rickey just posted a fifty word post about how someone farted in the next stall over and it smelled bad?
With what we're paying these reviewers, you'd think we could get some higher quality writing, eh, Froggy? - DieselI am grouchy. I've blown my nose like 27 times since I started writing this review. And I have a headache. I like Rickey's blog. He recently put up a post where he applied the law of diminishing returns to the Baldwin family. He also recently posted explaining New Hampshire to non-Hampshirites. I go up to NH fairly often (I've had family up there for the last 20 years) and he really hit the nail on the head. I think the good news is that while I've only been blogging for a year and a half or so, I've seen blogs drop like flies. A couple of the blogs on my blogroll are kaput and I'm just too lazy to go and take out the links. Rickey's a clever guy. If you enjoy satire or good observational humor you should stop by his place. I will, just as soon as I blow my nose.
------------------------------
Ok, I hope we all feel better. Nothing like a little constructive criticism. ;) - Diesel