Pontificating About Content And Form (at five bucks a pop?)

There is a weak ploy at The Weblog Review to hold a 'contest' for people to do their work for them: design their blog. The carrot? A fifty-dollar Amazon gift certificate and a link to your blog from The Weblog Review. Oh boy. They charge five dollars for your blog to be reviewed. For five dollars you get a few reviews, most of which are long winded and hard to concieve what anyone gets out of them. Here is a great example: "Finding the Joy is a lovely blog. The whole concept of the blog is lovely. Lovely, lovely, lovely. Beautiful too. Very beautiful." Or how about this useless excerpt, " I generally don't associate porn with 'writing' - especially good writing." Who does? The Weblog Review reviewers encourage a little "pizazz" in blogs to "show off" their posts, instead of using what they deem dreadfully boring blogspot templates (like this one). Speaking of boring design, I suppose that is why they need a contest to come up with someone else's fresh idea. Oh, that's right, the blogger dismisses his own sense of style, " I am unfortunately very busy with all kinds of other projects and am unable to learn the new coding standards." Excuses, excuses. Shouldn't your standards be a little higher for yourself if you're charging other people money for useless advice? Does this excerpt not explain their own blog quite well, ""Over-posting when there is very little of interest to say is a far worse crime in my opinion, and no one could accuse this blogger of such a crime"? The real crime is charging people or setting up bogus contests. If you can endure cute humor, like bracketing a 'rant' in tags (START RANT) and (/END RANT), or you like to be insulted for the favor of reading their blog (as practiced throughout the reviews with their novice treatments of 'content' and 'form'), then perhaps you would like to waste five dollars on getting your blog reviewed. It's very official, by the way, with each review getting a score from one to five; giving each reviewed blog an average. If you're still putting stars up on the board to earn your weekly allowance, then this 'review' might tickle your tummy.