Blogs we like

The best blog posts tend to be the ones that are short enough to keep you into the blog and want to read another - really long posts tend to exhaust you so that you just want to go back to mindless activity (not that they aren't valuable once in a while, but not all the time), but long enough to engage you and get you to think about something. I tend to gravitate toward those in our class that use humor or personal narratives in order to reach broader messages. Cory makes good use of triviality as a means to a broader statement, such as his "static" post, or one that stuck with me from the beginning of the year about how Michigan is not yet home despite doing all the things that one does at home here. As far as making the personal inviting to the public, this is something that sort of has to be well-written and nuanced in order for it to work. If you want people to read your blog, self-pity and too much information is probably not a great idea. To be honest, most people probably don't care about your personal life to any degree, let alone enough to read a long wallowing blog post. However, personal stories and feelings can be really interesting if well written and attempting to get at a broader point or theme. A great example of this is Cellik's blog, which uses a mix of formal and colloquial syntax in order to convey a broader theme, such as pride in one's roots, or attitudes about the monotony of going to college where you're from. These perspectives are not just "this thing happened to be today and I feel blank," which are very tedious and individualistic events happening to someone you don't really know, but rather these personal blog posts allow for introspection and get at broader implications that we all can relate to, which make them much more profound and interesting to read.
The only preference I have for the styles of the blog is something clean and preferably reflective of the blogger's personality, but really the only thing that matters is little clutter that makes for easy scrolling and post finding. I can't think of an image to put with this blog post.... Todaloo.