A sense of community spirit is something we all like to enjoy from time to time; knowing there is somewhere to go to where others will listen, care about what you say, let you have the time to air your views, rant and rave, talk politics, money, religion and sex, in short express yourself in ... Read review
Advantages: Community Spirit, Payments, Fun, Addictive, A chance to practice writing Disadvantages: Addictive, Slightly Draconian Policing
...to before.
Blogit.com allows you to enjoy such freedom to be creative, but be warned: being too opinionated can lead to eviction.
What is a blog? Or, better still, what is blogging? For the uninitiated, the word 'blog' is simply an abbreviation of the noun 'weblog'. A weblog is an online journal, or account of anything you wish to comment on, sometimes in the form of a monologue.
Until recently, blogging ... ...feel like.
Blogit.com is slightly different. Formerly known as the Blogging Network, and part of Shaycom Corporation, Blogit attracts people by offering them a chance to stretch their writing skills and to get paid for it. Unlike many other blogging sites, Blogit.com charges for the priviledge of using it, though to be fair the sum is a tiny $5.95 (a mere £3.34 in sterling at today's exchange rate) per month. In return, however, your ... more
A sense of community spirit is something we all like to enjoy from time to time; knowing there is somewhere to go to where others will listen, care about what you say, let you have the time to air your views, rant and rave, talk politics, money, religion and sex, in short express yourself in a way you maybe hadn't been able to before.
Blogit.com allows you to enjoy such freedom to be creative, but be warned: being too opinionated can lead to eviction.
What is a blog? Or, better still, what is blogging? For the uninitiated, the word 'blog' is simply an abbreviation of the noun 'weblog'. A weblog is an online journal, or account of anything you wish to comment on, sometimes in the form of a monologue.
Until recently, blogging was a minority passtime for web users, but it's currently gaining strength rapidly and more and more people are turning to blog sites either for recreation or business; many corporate companies are starting to use blog pages on their sites to discuss customer's usage of their products, while many more people are turning to dedicated blogging sites to share stories of their every-day life with friends.
Some blogs can be simply mundane, with bloggers recounting how they cooked the pasta for their tea, whilst others can be amusing and incredibly interesting. Searching the web for the word 'blog' will return literally hundreds of links to blogging sites, many offering you a free 'diary' to blog to as often or as little as you feel like.
Blogit.com is slightly different. Formerly known as the Blogging Network, and part of Shaycom Corporation, Blogit attracts people by offering them a chance to stretch their writing skills and to get paid for it. Unlike many other blogging sites, Blogit.com charges for the priviledge of using it, though to be fair the sum is a tiny $5.95 (a mere £3.34 in sterling at today's exchange rate) per month. In return, however, your blogs get ranked based on their popularity with other members of the site and a share of your payment gets divied out amongst the other members on a monthly basis. Whilst the financial returns will never give you the income of Stephen King, after a month or two of blogging regularly on the site you should find that your readership is paying you at least enough to cover your monthly fee, if not a little bit more.
Originally attracted to the site by its promises of literary practice I soon discovered that, to be fair, the site is nothing more than a big chat room as conversations ensue in the 'comments' section on many blogs discussing whether the author was right or wrong in their point of view, or simply sharing stories of their own opinions on what the author had written about. However, I soon found myself embroiled in the workings of many of these people and blogged daily about my own life while reading many of the blogs about others.
Blogit allow you to categorise your blog according to its content, with categories covering 'journal' and 'sport' through to 'writing' and 'news' and on to 'mature audience'. That way you can easily identify the content you wish to read or the subject area you wish to write under, and the web interface provided for entering your blog is clean and tidy with an HTML toolbar that allows you to add effects to your writing, include images and links to other sites, change colours and even drop in those annoying emoticons to the odd blog or comment.
So the good parts are: you get to practice your creative writing in a (mainly) supportive environment, where the people around you comment, praise, encourage and critique your writing; you get paid (though I use the term loosely); it's enjoyable and reading the works of many others is fascinating.
The bad parts? The biggest bone of contention is Blogit's ranking system. The more popular your blog is, the more you get paid - this seems fair enough, right? The trouble is, the most popular blogs are those that are either the most contentious, with some people posting deliberately bigotted points of view in order to drive traffic to their blog, or the posts referred to in the community as the 'distie lists'. These are when bloggers simply regularly produce a list of all the other bloggers they have read. The posts contain no or little writing of any worthy content, but they get a lot of visits to them because if you type in your userid in the search bar you will find literally hundreds of blogs referring to you; clicking on them to see what people have been saying about you will cause nothing but disappointment, however, as in the main you will simply find a list that says how much that person's read you, rather than a review of what you had written. If the site used a ranking system similar to that used by Ciao then rankings would alter significantly and the writers who's posts were excellent but had got bludgeoned by the 'vanity blogs' would soon find themselves reaping better rewards than they currently are.
Recently, however, it has become ever more noticeable that the policing of the site by its censors can be a little unfair. Blogit.com pride themselves on allowing their members to air very strong opinions, but if you are opinionated enough to disagree with the site administrator's point of view you can find yourself severely reprimanded and potentially barred from the site itself. These are extreme cases, but sometimes their policing method has not had a logical argument to back up its decisions.
Should you join this site? If you enjoy writing, be it in an amateur capacity or in the hopes that one day you will become a professional author, Blogit.com is a great place to practice your different skills and styles of writing. If you like reading about other people's days and enjoy other journal sites, then Blogit.com is an amusing place to visit and you can find yourself getting caught up in the soap opera of some peoples' lives.
There are some amusing writers on there and some with a great literary future ahead of them if they can make the break many of them so desperately want, but if a community site that borders on an overgrown chatroom is not your cup of tea then membership at Blogit.com is possibly something to steer clear of.
If you do join, however, make sure you don't upset the management... they're a little sensitive ;-)
