Group K: Nina E-tivity 2

..uf, I just got back from very long trip around the blogosphere. I have to say that I do feel overwhelmed with information right now. There is just so much out there to explore, read and learn about. After (literary) hours of clicking from one link to another, feeling a bit lost in space, I want to show you the blogs that are pretty nice and interesting.

The first one is a blog about anthropology. You can find many interesting articles about any topic that concerns anthropology. This might sound a bit confusing due to the big variety that the field offers; however it is not. They use a very useful system of adding a ‘filed under’ and ‘tags’ section under each article. So then you can easily find the way to the blogs or articles that concern your interest. I’ve looked at the article called On the Evaluation of Language, which lead me to other Linguistic Anthropology blogs.
The design of this blog is very simple and neat. Usages of simple colors, not overwhelming readers with too many links, colors and other ‘things to click on’ at once make the blog look very well organized.

Have Fun * Do Good is the second blog to be presented. From the title you can pretty much guess what it is about. It is “a blog for people who want to make the world a better place AND have fun!", as it is explained in the bolg itself. This blog really made a great impression on me. It is also very well organized. It uses some nice techniques that I didn’t see in other blogs, like the elements ‘Blogs I read’ and ‘Podcasts I listens to’, so you can see what the author is interested in and with whom he or she works, in other words, you get more into it☺. I highly recommend this blog to anyone who is interested into human rights!

My observation about the language used in blogs is mixed. I haven’t seen a blog only using formal language, for example. I feel like the language differs from post to post and it really depends what the author writes about, to whom he addresses the message and what is his/her general aim.

e-tivity 2, enrico (group k)

So, surfing the blogosphere is pretty exhausting... I knew lots and lots of people around the wwworld have blogs and myspace pages and stuff, I'd never realised how much time it might take to just have a look around at them!

Well, of course different people write in different ways according to the purpose they hope their blog may serve. I ran into some 'serious' political blogs dealing with issues which pretty much required a little bit of formal language. An example might be this ecologism-oriented blog.
You know, I'm all pro-ecologism and stuff, the only drawback is that having a coscience these days may cause depression at the point that you feel guilty for the scrap of paper you don't recycle but in the end you get suicidal for being so powerless while nuclear waste gets buried under corn fields and next thing you know you're too paranoid to eat your spaghetti cause who knows on which sort of polluted earth the corn was grown and oh deary deary me I really better stop here, mr Nervous Breakdown is on its way again...

On the other hand one political blog which I read sometimes has a pretty easy-going language. I'm talking about Beppe Grillo's blog, which, surprisingly (to me at least), is in the top ten of technorati's most popular blogs. Don't get me wrong, the issues he deals with are depressing as hell too, but he's always very direct and gives you the idea you can do something because he's done it (or doing it) too. Plus he's always pissed of and says bad words eheheh, and that always works when you need to cheer up folks who're really knee deep in s..t!

One totally different (humorous, for a change) blog I chose among those I browsed is this funny one. It's essentially a collection of Woody Allen quotes, from his movies, books, interviews, etc. I think he's simply brilliant, the very example of the fact that nerds are smart and funny. No matter if you're nuts, as long as you can crack a good joke, right?
By the way, on this blog there's a link to some '25000 proverbs' page which is also kinda great (I particularly liked the Russian proverb that goes "A pessimist is a well-informed optimist" ahahah, not really new, kinda already heard, but a classic is a classic, isn't it?).

Another topic I searched through technorati was Dostoevsky and related matters. There were some blogs referring to Dostoevsky in a quite vague way (like they had this one sinlge post about one of his books) but I chose to bring you a couple of myspace pages instead. Some are dedicated to Him (he actually has 6 impersonations living on!!!) and one dedicated to a character of his, Raskolnikov from 'Crime and Punishment' and another one to a character from 'The Idiot', Rogozhin. Of course the fact that they are MySpace pages makes them different, because a myspace page is not a real 'orthodox' blog, but more a pre-constructed page (intended to be used mainly to leave comments to your 'friends') with specific functions: a photo log, a message board, some info about the person who created that page, and then a specific area for the blog post.
I don't know what you think about it, I guess some of you people even have a myspace account... Well, uh, thing is, I have one myself, or at least my band has one on MySpace Music... Yeah, I know it's lame, that's not something I'm really proud of, but I have to admit it's useful, it makes it very easy to contact people and set gigs and stuff, so... What surprises me is how many kids have a myspace page these days. Really, I mean, I didn't even have a cell phone in my time, but well, I guess it's just the way it goes... We called them 'salad days' hah... salad days...