Blog Review: I bring nothing to the table


Mirthful Dan
Dan, of "I Bring Nothing to the Table"

First mentioned in this post , Dan’s been blogging on this server for just over a year.  So how has the blog come along in these 13 months?  Very well, I’d say.  By the Google search results metric, Dan is doing very well.  He’s been driving the bulk of our Google search related traffic with his sports and video game posts.  (My posts tend to spread by word or mouth or search engines other than Google)

Dan has been able to create a structure and stick to it and I definitely admire him for that.  Consistently as an Ubuntu release, Dan has each category appear on the proper day week in and week out with very few exceptions.  By way of contrast, I blog all willy-nilly about whatever happens to interest me at the time.  Readers tend to like predictability and it shows with Dan’s hits.

I think Dan’s best writing comes out when he takes the time to write long posts.  Most of my favorite posts are three paragraphs and longer.  That’s when Dan’s style emerges and the reader can see how good he is.  Category-wise the “Wednesday Quarterback” and “Game Overview” tend to exibit the best writing.

Dan has also had some long-running series that have worked really well.  Garnering him some of the large share of his Google hits was his long series on Final Fantasy villains.

The posts I dislike the most are the ones that heavily rely on video.  99.9% of the reason I don’t like those are because they tend to feature less Dan-prose.  And Dan’s writing is the best thing about his blog.  Although it is nice to have someone sift through all the videos out there and present some great ones (such as the Street Fighter IV Translation video), it’s not what I go to the blog for.

So check out Dan’s blog if you like good, in-depth articles about sports and/or video games.


One response to “Blog Review: I bring nothing to the table”

  1. Shh…you discovered my secret: videos are for when I don’t have as much time to write!

    I’m actually trying to remedy some of that this year, so we’ll see how that goes. Thanks for the great review, maybe I’ll review your review and get all meta on you.