Foreign Perspectives

Blogging reviews seem to come in two basic flavours: 1) nice ones just to get the link and 2) proper ones that are actually useful.

Much as the first type serve their purpose in getting you a link to your site and they’re the safest ones to go for, they’re pretty much useless except for the linkback that they provide. In practice, they’re not overlly useful for that link either as, for the most part, bloggers with really high PR rarely review those with much lower PR who could benefit most.

The second type can be pretty scary though. After all, who among us has a “perfect” blog? Probably 99% of us have just picked the first reasonable looking template and ran with that so there’s usually a lot of scope for criticism on that front (my current one has been described as “Kermit the frog” for instance). Likewise, sod’s law applying as always chances are that they’ll look at your blog when you’ve just written a bunch of posts that are “less than your best” at best and more than likely they’ll be “total ****” even if all your other posts have been Pulitzer material.

But, that second type is far and away the most useful type to get. Sure, there’ll be things that you disagree with either partially or even entirely, but so what? You’re hardly likely to be writing stuff that people will agree with all the time, are you? On the other hand you’ll almost certainly get some useful ideas that you can implement to improve things. For example, about a year ago one one of the “type 2 reviews” that I got pointed out that it was a pain to have to page through endless posts on how to move to France and that I should collect them in one place, so there’s now a link to a compilation of them under “Series Collections” as you can see.

What a “type 2” review doesn’t have to be is nasty. Yes, you may well get a review where someone basically criticises everything on your blog (unlikely, but possible) but they don’t have to be nasty about it and I’ve yet to see one where they were out and out nasty.

Anyway, if anyone’s interested in a review from me, and will review this blog in return, let me know!