Blog Party

The past week I followed three blogs - their appearance, content and purpose - to get some ideas and inspiration about what I would/ would not like my blog to be or look like.

http://marypinckney.blogspot.com

This is my girlfriend's blog. It's a personal blog she started when she went to Germany for a year to keep people at home informed about her life. After she came back she continued the blog as a medium to share her thoughts and experiences with the "world", or rather people who are interested.
She also uses blogger.com but knows a good deal about html to create her own layout for the page. Thus she doesn't have to rely on the restricted choice of blogger.com templates, which is a good thing if you want to give your blog a more personal touch. Beside text she includes a lot of photography and videos, too. Youtube.com allows you to directly post videos from their site on a blog you can associate with your account. I think that is a really good feature which I would definitely use for this blog to show some videos that I used in my class to teach culture e.g.

http://hausbau-in-egelsbach.blogspot.com/

This is a blog that friends of mine in Germany started to document the process of how their new house is being built. They have many text posts describing their struggles with German bureaucracy but the majority of posts include pictures of the house building process such as new features that were added to the house. They also use the blog to share problems and questions with fellow house-builders.
They changed the blogger template and included a picture in the upper frame. Once I figure out how to do that, I'll probably include a picture on my blog , too. I also like the weather report that is included in the sidebar.

http://www.themovieblog.com/

This blog apparently doesn't use any blogging platform and seems oriented towards a much broader audience than the former two. Somehow I find it a little disturbing that the sidemenu is on the left but I can't really explain why. (Maybe it has something to do with the difference between left and right brain hemisphere.) It seems as if most of the information posted on the blog is drawn from other entertainment sites. It also includes some google ads in each post which I find rather distracting. (Sorry, google, you can't advertise on my blog!)
The blog can also be subsccribed to on Itunes as a podcast which is a very interesting feature, I think.