Exploring the blogosphere

Hi everyone!

After hours and hours on Technorati, I decided to suggest these two blogs to you. Hope you like them!

As I like planning cheap journeys in Europe, I put in the tags the word “travelling Europe”, and I came up with a blog called Europe String, which I found particularly interesting. The author is a girl who lives now in Frankfurt, but in her life she lived in the USA, Hong Kong, China and Korea. She has been travelling around the world for business and leisure, and for this reason she feels qualified to give tips about travelling on a budget! She shares information about cheap restaurants in our continent, cheap ways of getting around -weather by land, sea or air- and where to sleep -from hostels to sleeping at airports. She also focuses on particular cities giving a combination of info.
I like this blog because it has a lot of links -both in and out the written text- to other blogs or websites on the same or related topics.

As I love tasting new dishes, I wanted to look for a blog that might give me some ideas for new recipes. I chose a blog called A Slice of Cherry Pie, which is simply something appetizing!In my opinion this blog is much more interesting than others about food because it shows you many recipes you can come up with using seasonal ingredients. The author is an English girl who posts her specialities and photos. She is a self-taught cook who is passionate about good food and home cooking. I like this blog because it is full of images which catch the reader’s eye.
I would recommend it to you because it communicates the pleasure of cooking and teaches you genuine recipes for your body. Personally, I believe cooking makes you feel relaxed.

The style used in the blogs I chose is very similar as in both the language is almost informal. That can be seen for example by the use of the contracted forms of auxiliary verbs, the negative contraction, the negation with “any”, “going to” for future prediction, the relative pronoun “that”, abbreviations and exclamation marks. I think the language it’s not very informal because there aren’t any slangs, dots and swear words.

Searching for blogs, I’ve noticed that I was mostly attracted by those that have an original and readable title, so I can say blogs’ titles are extremely important to catch the reader’s attention. The layout is very important, too. It shouldn’t be too much complicated because it could create confusion in the reader’s mind, and so on first sight the reader could prefer to visit other blogs. As regards links I’ve noticed that most of them aren’t the url but just a clickable word which is part of the text. Visiting blogs I’ve also realized that the language can vary from specialized to everyday according to the topic and the audiance. It can be also spontaneous, just like a real conversation, or a little bit more planned when it describes something. Of course, the formality of the language used might be influenced by the relationship between bloggers and readers.

That’s all for now. I look forward to reading your comments!

See you,
Selena