sinnamon's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- diary reviews I am bit drunk so please forgive me if this entry makes little sense. Also don’t get mad at me for writing this. Hell, go ahead and get mad at me. What the hell. I got a google for boobies galore. Do I get an award or something? Anyway I was reading my lovely guestbook and found a msg from cherrybeauty about how I had left a msg on a diary reviewer notes section asking them if they had ever given a bad review. I hope the above sentence is coherent. I think UncleBob recently mentioned something about diary reviewing but I am way too out of it to try and find what he said. Back in the days of Erik, we had a cute little thing that has now turned into notes. It was a reviewer. People had a couple of choices (that I can not remember right now) about how good your diary was. At first the reviews were cute, no one ever actually gave bad reviews. Until the betheigh conspiracy happened. I think it had to do with the fact that Bef was honest in her reviews and people didn’t like that. So soon the receivers of bad reviews found themselves on Bef’s review page where they acted like children and bashed her. It escalated into a full scale war. People were leaving msgs in support of both sides. It was ridiculous. Eventually those reviews closed down. Then Bob came along and reopened them. Sometime later, Andrew made them his own, leaving out the review part and just making them “notes.” I never really had a problem with those reviews, they were silly, fun and usually from people who actually read your diary. Not a committee of people who were critiquing based on some kind of criteria. I think that is my main problem with the diary reviewers. No offense to the reviewers of course. I went to their site, just checking it out. I looked over most of the reviews listed. I didn’t see any bad reviews. The lowest score was somewhere in the 70’s range. That’s still passing. I looked at the rules and found them utterly ridiculous! They score based on such unimportant things as spelling. Everyone knows that I can not spell worth a crap. I don’t think that good writing is based on one’s ability to spell correctly. I misspell words purposely all the time. Hell the name of my diary is Sinnamon, is that five points off? I believe good writing can surpass small things like bad spelling. Most diarists have the common decency to run a spell checker but I am betting that a lot of people, including some people who don’t speak English natively, don’t bother. Also, they read ten entries before they give a review. I don't think anyone can form a well-educated opinion about a diary in ten entries, unless the diary is about eleven entries thick. The response to my question: “do you ever give bad reviews” was that the purpose of the review site was not to put anyone down, but only to give constructive criticism. That seems noble but I personally believe that is fluff. Now, let me stop here for a moment and try to clarify. A diary is your life, your thoughts, your hidden agendas in prose. It’s all neatly typed out and pleasantly presented for the reader. At least that’s how mine is. How can you review someone’s life? How can you constructively criticize someone’s personal feelings or thoughts? I guess my main problem is the concept behind diary reviews. Let’s say you don’t care about the reviewee’s feelings and give them a bad review. Their diary didn’t pique your interest, you found yourself dozing off in the middle of entries. How can you say “Hey bub, your life is boring” with a straight face, especially someone who sits around reading other people’s lives and rating them? It is not the pot calling the kettle black? I find the whole concept just sad and utterly dishonest. On one hand, you do not want to hurt anyone’s feelings. But lying about having interest in a diary that you really felt was Borefest ’01 is deluding the people that read and care about your review. As a reviewer, don’t you have some sort of moral obligation to be honest in your opinions? Do you think that when the reviewers of albums or novels hand out bad reviews they care about being constructive at all? I’ve seen critics be extremely harsh based on the theory that there is no such thing as bad press. Also, who wants to read a critic who is constantly handing out good thoughts? Humans live for the nasty! :) So that is my basic problem with diary reviews. It’s more fundamental conflict of interests on the reviewers part. At least that is my opinion. Which really no one but me cares about, but since it is my diary, I will share it anyway. I think I am done now :) 12:14 AM - 2001-12-12 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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