Million Blogs lets you get a blog based on keywords of your choosing. These keyblogs are a free and fully functional WordPress blog you can use to advertise your product or business, monetize, or even sell. In addition to this service, the main page of Million Blogs discusses tips, tricks, and news related to its service.

The first little comment I have is please make the comment text a link - I pretty much always expect “3 comments” or “2 comments” to link over to the comments section. In addition, it might not be a bad idea to link the “add your comment here” text to the actual comment form. I’m just picky like that

In addition, the blog is a bit hard to navigate due to a lack of back/next links at the bottom of the page, and the posts don’t list which category they are in. The feed auto-discovery code doesn’t point to the feedburner feed either.

Besides those little minor problems, the main blog are well built and well written, and the service appears to be running perfectly.

Rating:

My rating for Million Blogs is…

Content: 9/10 - So what does well written content, easy to read posts, and extra goodies deserve? An automatic 9/10 of course.

Design: 7/10 - There are several ways this could be improved. For one thing the logo is a bit distracting - which I think is because it isn’t spaced out from the content enough and the mirror effect isn’t quite transparent enough. There’s also not a previous/next posts link on the bottom, and the bottom is a bit empty - maybe add in a quick “about us” section? The feed auto-discovery code also isn’t set to the FeedBurner feed - and there are no obvious subscription links anywhere besides the bottom of the sidebar.

Uniqueness: 8/10 - There are somewhat similar services, so this isn’t a brand new concept, but the blog content is unique and the service appears to be well built and well executed.

I just got my password in for the private Hulu beta today and wow - it kicks ass. TechCrunch was right - this thing is great. It’s quality is many times better than YouTube, it runs smoothly, the quality is even good when on full screen, and it is free. Not to mention it is legal.

I’m generally a bit hard to please (I like perfection!) so it should mean a lot when I say this thing blows almost every other online video service away.

Have you tried Hulu yet? What were your impressions?

In a nutshell, Lame News is about… well… lame news. Basically it is news that isn’t really reported on any major websites. Some of it is quite funny, but some of it is plain weird. In addition to all of that, there is a trivia contest that involves putting together words to get a quote from a movie. The prize? Money of course.

I have to admit - when I first visited Lame News I would have thought it was a self hosted blog if it weren’t for blogspot being in the URL. It absolutely shocked me that it is a blogspot blog. I suppose the anime chick on the header is also a plus. What else can I say - I’m a big fan of the layout.

However, as with pretty much every blogspot blog I’ve reviewed - the feed doesn’t point to the provided Feedburner feed. Every time I see a blog that does that I just can’t help but wonder how many readers it has that aren’t recorded on Feedburner.

Rating

My overall rating for Lame News is…

Content: 8/10 - It’s funny, sarcastic, and it even discusses the idiocy of the OLPC project (which I support by the way - but seriously… give those kids food and clean water, not a friggin laptop!).
Design: 9/10 - I Love it. it is clean, easy to use, and it seriously tricked me into thinking it was a self hosted wordpress blog. Just fix up that little feed issue though
Uniqueness: 7/10 - Since it is a news blog I do have to mark this a bit lower (there’s millions of news blogs), but being funny and opinionated (like Engadget) saves it from getting a bad uniqueness score.

If you’re into random and funny blogs, I’d highly recommend checking out Lame News!

Before I get started with this review - I’d like to make it clear that despite the fact this is a Christian blog I will review it the same as all other blogs - by giving my opinion on how to make it better and pointing out any obvious problems I see. If you’re wondering, I’m Agnostic - and because of that I tend to be fairly neutral on topics such as the existence of deities.

To be honest when I first visited The Bible Thumper’s Soapbox I was a bit scared off by four things - the sidebar is quite chaotic and doesn’t seem to have much organization, there are way too many little widgets and buttons and such (around 20?), and the feed subscription info was fairly impossible to find. The last thing is when I did a quick test of the RSS feed in my feed reader it looks as if 12 or so long posts were posted on the same day:

If they were really short one paragraph things it’d be fine - but they are all several paragraphs long. Either there’s a bit of information overload going on, or something got messed up on blogger.

I guess my point is there doesn’t seem to be much organization of the blog outside of the categories/labels. The homepage could probably also use a few less posts… since they are a bit long maybe 3-5 per page would be a bit more reasonable?

Rating

My overall rating for The Bible Thumper’s Soapbox is:

Content: 7/10 - The posts are fairly well written - but the posting schedule seems a bit erratic.
Design: 5/10 - The organization of the sidebar and footer seem a bit chaotic. However - a simple removal of some of the buttons and widgets and such would clean it right up.
Uniqueness: 8/10 - While there are quite a few religious blogs out there, this one has a personal touch.
Overall: 6/10 - All the widgets and such really bring down the overall rating.

You can visit The Bible Thumper’s Soapbox here, and subscribe to it here.

360 Degree Success is a personal development blog written by David Richeson and Dario Salas Sommer. It covers a lot of interesting topics, but I found the posts on bottled water and why “doing everything right” doesn’t necessarily make you happy.

The main problem I have with 360 Degree Success is it doesn’t have any obvious disclosures. I’m thinking it probably wouldn’t be a bad idea for a personal development blog to have a simple “I am not responsible for your actions, content here may not be 100% correct for everyone, no warranty” type of disclosure to protect themselves from any possible issues that may arise in the future. While chances are no legal issues will pop up - it definitely isn’t a bad idea to be prepared in the current Internet environment.

I’m also quite happy to see Feedburner finally getting used, although I am a bit curious as to why they didn’t post the Feedburner URL on the “RSS Subscribers– Please resubscribe today” post. Looks like the feed autodiscovery also has to be updated to reflect the feed URL change.

Rating

My overall rating for 360 Degree Success is:

Content: 9/10 - Well written, fairly useful advice.
Design: 7/10 - Not a big fan of yellow, and some things could probably use better padding. For example, the footer of each post with the comments link can look funky if it wraps onto the next line.
Uniqueness: 8/10 - There’s a lot of unique content, but some of the posts are fairly similar to other posts I’ve read on different blogs.
Overall: 8/10 - A few little issues here and there, but for the most part I like it.

You can check out the blog here, and subscribe to it here.