Evaluation Assignment

1. According to Technorati's "State of the Blogosphere 2011," 60 percent of bloggers are hobbyists, and 61 percent measure the success of their blog by personal satisfaction. I think this is the category I most identify with because I am not currently maintaining this blog for profit. One good tip I pulled from this address is to use labels and tag words to attract readers from your specific audience. Technorati lists the top 30 tag words (or labels) that were used in 2011, including news, business, politics, entertainment, and video. Another tip I learned was to incorporate more photos, videos, and music into my blog, since these are the majority of bloggers are using these mediums.

2. What area of your blog do you need to work on to improve?

• I think I need to work on the layout of my blog because the background picture is hard to see and the header is awfully bulky.

3. What would make your blog more interesting?

• To increase the level of interest on my blog, I will start incorporating more intricate and interactive features on my blog, creating a well-balanced mix of pictures, links, videos and text.

4. Show the blog you're following. List one strength and one place it could be improved.

• I have chosen to follow Ree Drummond's blog, The Pioneer Woman (http://thepioneerwoman.com), specifically the cooking section, The Pioneer Woman Cooks! (http://thepioneerwoman.com/cooking).

• One strength about this blog is that it includes great pictures that are of high quality and that are relevant to the topic of the post.



Ree Drummond of The Pioneer Woman

• One improvement that could be made to the blog is a lot of de-cluttering. This is obviously a blog that makes money because there are many advertisements; however, this clutters up the blog and makes it much more difficult to focus on the actual content of the blog.