Bloggeries is looking at a blog pertaining to the music industry today, and you can find ‘My Life My Music’.The blog is owned by 22 year old Carl who is blogging from the Phillipines. The blog is entirely about the music industry and entertainment news related to music in popular culture. Carl expresses his love for music in his blog header, which says, ‘Music speaks what cannot be expressed, soothes the mind and gives it rest, heals the heart and makes it whole, flows from heaven to the soul’. You can see this philosophy in action by checking out any of Carl’s latest bloggeries: My IMS Family; Winehouse Scraps Awards Gig, Heads to Rehab; Beyonce, Rihanna, Underwood Performing at Grammy’s; Keys Still Atop Album Chart in Slow Sales Week; Florida Remains No.1, but Brown Closes in, Heath Ledger Found Dead in NYC at age 28; American Idol Ratings Down from Last Year; Brad Renfro, 25, found Dead in Los Angeles Home; and Meet the Funky People.
The blog is well organized and nicely laid out which makes it very easy to navigate. Bloggeries are in white text on a black background with red colored musical bordering and links are in red. I personally found this theme to be difficult on the eyes and made reading difficult, so this may be something the blogger wants to look into changing. Bloggeries are left marginalized and there is a right navigation bar. In the navigation bar there is an advertising offer, Recent Posts/Archives Menu, Interesting Blogs Menu, Feeds Information, Blog Directory Buttons, Comments Window if you would like to add something to the Blog Main page, MyBlogLog Readers widget, Friends List, and an About page. Each bloggery is accompanied by relevant pictures, which works well for the blog and adds meaning to each piece of content. What I do not see is a Categories Menu which would be a great addition to this blog with its niche being in Entertainment. Categories would definitely add to the searchability of the blog and provide the blogger with more search engine traffic.
I am going with a 3/5 for this blog. My first suggestion would be to remove the annoying pop-up that occurs as the blog is loaded. This is extremely distracting from the point of the blog and as a result, affects both the overall appearance of the blog as well as navigation. The content scores well for the blog as it is written by outside news sources. Despite the fact that the blogger does not write his own content, he does cite each source which, while it loses some of the point of a personal blog tone, he still maintains active content. I would suggest the blogger hire someone to write his About page if he does not speak English, as the about page is not in English and thus the blogger will be unable to connect to his English readership through this about page. Otherwise however, despite not having a true personal voice and having some appearance issues, this blog is a good read for those interested in the music industry.
-Chrissie