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Hey all!
For the first time ever, I was invited and participated on an internet radio program for the Blogger News Network (BNN) called “The Week in Reviews.” Hosted by Simon Barrett, the leader of BNN, I participated in a panel of reviewers that also included Matt Mungle (who’s a writer for BlogCritics.org, BNN, and other venues) and Andrew Dodge (who also writes for BNN and other venues).
We basically introduced ourselves and shot the breeze for 30 minutes. It was a very interesting conversation about how these other folks got into reviewing, what they consider a good review, what they do when they have to write a bad review of a product, and so on. I hope the radio program continues far into the future and more reviewers get a chance to share their “wisdom” (my wisdom wasn’t all that great compared to these guys who had been reviewing since the 1980s!) with other reviewers and listeners!
You can listen to the radio show here on Blog Talk Radio at your leisure. There should be a new episode next week, though at this point I’ve not been invited to participate. (I’d be happy to if the opportunity came up again!)
Just a few months ago (July 12 to be exact), I was happily shouting from the rooftops about 10,000 visitors! And now three months later I’m hitting 20,000 visitors. That’s insane.
It’s nice to know that at least a few folks get a kick out of reading my blog.
Thanks to this GREAT plug-in (Star Rating for Reviews) I was able to revamp my site’s review summary quite a bit to simplify the process. Before I had to hand-code the HTML for the summary, which led to problems when I revamped my blog as well as meant I had to be very diligent in making sure it kept updated (which I didn’t, sorry).
Now it automatically updates thanks to some PHP code, and it’s easy to sort and see when a review was posted, where to find it, and what the rating was. Awesome.
So check out the new page here and poke around. Maybe you’ll find a review you didn’t see before.
A few weeks back, Jean at Sizzling Popcorn was the winner of a contest I held at the Lair and one part of the “winnings” was a review of his site. It’s taken a while, but I’m finally getting back to that!
When I first started with Entrecard, I ran across Sizzling Popcorn’s initial incarnation as a blog and was impressed by the width and depth of some of the reviews there. When Jean got his own domain and retooled his site with the new look, I was even more impressed.
SP focuses on the breadth of movies in the industry — everything from Action and Adventure to Documentary and Drama, and everything in-between. Each review is rated on the SP system:
Sizzling Popcorn - a great movie that is bound for awards shows
Butter Popcorn - a great movie that may not be bound for the awards shows
Popcorn - a good, but not great movie
Kernel - not so good, but may be a renter
and Burnt Popcorn - which isn’t worth watching
Not only did the site revamp a few months ago change the look and feel of SP, but it gave it a lot more flexibility in terms of graphical layout, advertising, sponsoring, and so on.
Jean always gets the jump on new movies and movie news too — most recently, Jean got to see premieres of several movies and I was jealous!
I have to admit that SP is one of those sites I head to when I’m debating on seeing a movie at the theater or not. I don’t always agree with Jean, but more often than not we seem to have a similar feel for various movies. And it’s always good to get a second opinion.
So we at the Lair wish Sizzling Popcorn all the best and hope that Jean continues to do well with the site!
Who knows who I might review next? 7 Miles Down? Reel Ninja?
In honor of having my 10,000th visitor a few weeks ago, I’m holding a contest… For 1000 EntreCard credits, a review of your site and a permanent 125×125 ad on my site, submit your favorite three posts from my blog as a comment on this post (or this reminder post).
I’ll choose one submission randomly and announce the winner on this Friday, August 1, 2008! So act fast if you want in on the action!
I entered a time warp this weekend as I attended my 20th high school reunion with my wife and saw tons of people from my past. Nearly every face brought back memories of lockers, classes, and goofy times in band classes (yes, I was a band geek).
It made me laugh… I only really recognized about 1/3 of the people I saw. And of those, my brain only spit out names for about 1/2 of them… So it was JUST like high school.
I was amazed by some of the folks I saw that I hadn’t seen since the 10 year reunion or even since graduation… It floored me to see how some people had changed and others hadn’t changed at all. What it is it about some people’s genes that makes them timeless?
I was also amazed by the number of people from my graduating class with older kids. Guess I started late with my wife.
And lastly I was amazed that some of those folks who got married right out of high school are STILL married! That’s a testament that sometimes you get lucky the first time and beat the odds of divorce in our country.
Anybody with any reunions this summer? How’d they go?
Back to our regularly scheduled programming tomorrow morning.
Have some exciting news! A friend of mine, Andrew, is going to start adding articles about console games (like the PS3), movies, and whatever else he wants to write about.
Today just seems to be a day for odd posts on my blog.
This weekend had a VERY funny cartoon from Pearls Before Swine, written by Stephen Pastis, in my Sunday newspaper. I have to share it with the blogging community (though I’m sure it’s been shared again and again and again) because my wife got a huge kick out of it (and so did I).
One of the reasons I wanted to update my blog was so I had a ton more control over the theme, layout, and plug-ins included in the Wordpress installation. I’ve come to really appreciate having the extra control over what actually shows up in my layout. But one of the things I’ve struggled with has been banner advertisements.
I want to advertise. I’m not planning on making billions of dollars here, but would like a bit of some extra income from my writing if at all possible. But I’m not much of a marketer. And web design is very new to me. So figuring out where to put these banners has been a bit of a mystery.
Then I came across the MaxBlogPress Max Banner Ads plug-in. This is Review-ware, which I’ve never heard about before, but the idea is that it’s free to anybody who wants to write a review about it. So that’s this post. I think this thing is awesome.
I’ve been able to consolidate a few things into one widget. And it rotates the ads automatically.
So, as I said, I’m never going to make billions doing this. But it cleans up the look/feel of the blog significantly and handles the management of those things so I don’t have to.
I heartily recommend that anybody who has banner ads on their site check it out!
fitz in 
We basically introduced ourselves and shot the breeze for 30 minutes. It was a very interesting conversation about how these other folks got into reviewing, what they consider a good review, what they do when they have to write a bad review of a product, and so on. I hope the radio program continues far into the future and more reviewers get a chance to share their “wisdom” (my wisdom wasn’t all that great compared to these guys who had been reviewing since the 1980s!) with other reviewers and listeners!![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=0e4ea148-ebd1-4306-b1f9-3659269ae0c0)
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Hey all…
