For this week, I have once again decided to explore the internet for valuable and informative resources related to my blog subject of film and television. Located on the LinkRoll to the right, these ten new sites represent some of the best the internet has to offer in terms of blogs, news, and coverage of the entertainment industry. I have used the evaluation criteria outlined by the Webby Awards and IMSA in order to better guide my readers to the best the internet has to offer.The first site, Rotten Tomatoes, is a very popular site that offers aggregate review scores for recent films, utilizing as many different reviewers as possible (an example of some scores can be seen in the graphic to the left). The site is very easy to use, and makes it easy to connect with other review sites through links on each review. Metacritic is a similar review based site. While it offers reviews for anything from movies and DVDs to books, it fails to equal Rotten Tomatoes due to dull visuals. Moving to television, TV.Com is a massive site dedicated to information regarding any show ever to hit the air. While its resources are vast, I found the site to be difficult to navigate at times, mostly due to visual clutter on the homepage. A part of the Underground Online network of entertainment sites, The UGO TV Blog presents daily news in casual, blog form. One of the sites strengths is its interactivity, giving users the ability to comment on stories, or submit ones of their own.
Joblo's Movie Emporium is a very diverse site, featuring blog-format news along with reviews, videos and a massive message board community. While the site is fan friendly, it's hardly a scholarly source. In a similar vein is I Watch Stuff, a blog that takes humorous jabs at movie news. While the site is far from serious, it does provide an extensive amount of content, especially images and videos. On the other end of the movie blog spectrum is Cinematical. This very professional looking blog provides smart and fresh perspectives on the most up to date news in the industry. The Movie Blog is a particularly strong site because it goes beyond just the daily post blog-style, including video blog entries, most recently featuring an interview with Heroes' Milo Ventimiglia. The next site, The Hollywood Reporter, focuses its news more on the industry side than the gossip and review side, but unfortunately suffers from a dull layout. Finally, Showbiz Data is a bit different than the sites previously featured. This site takes a very technical view of box office numbers, presenting them daily, as well as featuring sections with job opportunities and market shares of each major studio. I feel these sites provide a diverse look at what the internet has to offer, and well compliments the sites previously on the LinkRoll.
1 comment:
It seems that this collection of websites and blogs is very comprehensive. What I appreciate most about your post is that it is very concise and fairly easy to read. You provide brief, yet insightful descriptions of each web item you listed, which not only informs, but also maintains attention, which is especially important for addressing those not focused in the fields of film and television like myself. I find your commentary about sites with and without strong visual quality to be extremely helpful, because visual layout and organization plays a major role in the facility of a web based item. For example, although you praise Metaciritc for offering good reviews "for anything from movies to DVDs and books," you warn that it has "dull visuals."
The only thing I would suggest is that you could perhaps more clearly organize the overall order in which you describe the sites and blogs that you found. This way, readers could see how each of these items relates to each other from a broader perspective. For example, it seems that the resources you found can generally be categorized into news sources and review sources. If you took this organization and then distributed the sites and blogs from each category into two respective paragraphs, it would be even easier for readers to compare the resources, and more importantly, understand the individual characteristics that distinguish each site and make it useful and important.
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