Recent Blog Entries
Instablogs Launches
Written by Mike Rundle on October 7, 2005
Instablogs finally launched only a few hours after they were supposed to. I distinctly remember talking to Paul a full 24 hours after they were supposed to launch (east coast) but maybe I was hallucinating.
As a designer and reader, I’m a bit disappointed to see that every single one of their weblogs suffers from the chronic DLWD, or Default Looking Weblog Disease, which happens to befall so many other weblogs out there. C’mon guys, if you weren’t going to actually design your blogs, at least use one of the really cool Wordpress templates and adapt it to fit your own system.
I’m also equally disappointed to see that the vast majority of weblog posts from their authors are nothing more than a paragraph or two and then a link-out. I’ve only looked at about 10 of their weblogs so far, but I really haven’t seen any deep thought or great commentary. One of the things we look for when recruiting 9rules members is their ability to take multiple sources of information and then come up with their own take on a certain situation or technology. But, to their credit, Instablogs is still in their infancy and I’m sure their fleet of full-time writers will start generating original content soon enough.
Congratulations to our friends over at Instablogs: they launched a ton of weblogs and still rock cool cartoons. Great job guys!
October 7th, 2005 at 7:40 am
I agree with your remarks on the looks of InstaBlogs. This actually happens quite often, fine (web) products being launched looking like crap. Of course blogging is more about the content than it is about looks but on the other hand, looks are the first thing visitors are confronted with.
If a website looks very nice, people will definitely dig deeper than if it looks mediocre or plain ugly.
When arriving at InstaBlogs I’m not quite ‘Instantly’ triggered to dive into the blogs and start reading. It really makes me wonder why it seems to be so hard for a lot of projects to get a designer to join the bandwagon and make it look good.
A generic look for all blogs is fine but at least give it a somewhat professional look. The fine fools sites look the same as well but they’re an awful lot nicer to look at than the ones over at InstaBlogs.
October 7th, 2005 at 8:15 am
Blogging may be more about content than looks but still, the designs are awful. Design is meant to encourage and ease the use of a product, and nothing about those pages made me want to be there one little bit.
October 7th, 2005 at 8:18 am
>>Congratulations to our friends over at Instablogs: they launched a ton of weblogs and still rock cool cartoons. Great job guys!
Thanks Guys, we are constantly improving ourselves in all departments, programming, design and above all content.
Installing wordpress could have been easy, nice suggestion. But we have decided to build our script fround the ground up.
October 8th, 2005 at 2:14 am
Mike, I agree mate. Just because it’s a blog doesn’t mean it has to be ugly.
October 8th, 2005 at 3:58 am
Blogging Networks
There’s been a lot of noise about blogging networks around the place. People selling and buying them:
Weblogs Inc to AOL
Weblogs.com to Verisign
while others are launching them:
B5media
Instablogs
Fine Fools
Personally all I se…
October 8th, 2005 at 4:00 am
[...] . Then again it never claimed it was going to give me any money, nor would I expect it to. Mike’s written about this as well. So I’m sat hear thinking (amongst other thing [...]
October 9th, 2005 at 12:01 am
Nandini-
I meant Wordpress DESIGN templates. I’m sure since you’re intelligent enough to code your own system that you could pull out the necessary XHTML/CSS and make it work with Instablog blogs. But thanks for misunderstanding me anyway, it’s nice that you noticed.
October 10th, 2005 at 8:41 am
All these blog networks remind me of the gaming network explosion about 4 years ago. It’s started with gamespy and their planet** sites. Soon everyone wanted their own game network, I saw at least 6 of them start during the dot com boom period, most of them are gone now leaving the huge IGN/Gamespy merged network.
October 10th, 2005 at 9:04 am
Actaully make that 6 years (has it really been that long?!).
BTW I like what you are doing with 9rules, but I can see a load of generic networks starting up, especially after the weblogs inc sale.
November 27th, 2005 at 7:20 pm
I agree, instablogs design is really bad. I am confused by the layout, there is simply too much information. Brain overloading. The injection of random yahoo ads in little nook and crannies make it worse.