Blog analysis- Mashable

    During this quarter, I have been reading the Mashable blog. Mashable, which was created by Pete Cashmore, is a social networking news blog. With allegedly over 5 million monthly pageviews, 166,000 per month revenue, it ranks 9^th among the largest blogs on the Internet. Mashable regularly writes about MySpace, YouTube, Bebo, Facebook, and Xanga, but it also reports on less high-profile social networking sites such as twitter. The website also features its own social network, customized profiles, and MySpace layouts.

    Actually, I like its content more than the design because I personally think its design is too complicated. Here are some pros and cons.

Pros-

•  The colorful and energetic page (dark blue, light blue, pink, and gray )
•  Clear label with brief introduction, quick links and categories on its header.
•  Search engine of its website
•  Useful and interesting widgets such as most popular post and recent visitors
•  Update very fast, almost every hour
•  Easy to let readers subscribe to its new post and daily email enewsletter. It provides many web-based news readers such like my yahoo, google, and bloglines
•  Easy to read because almost every post has picture or chart to support its claim and every post is short.
•  Responsible: it shows the email and also provides its other social media like LinkedIn and Technorati to contact the owners.
• Allegiance – it has its own social network, customized profiles, and MySpace layouts.

Cons-

•  Too many Ads.
•  No “about us.

    In conclusion, I will continue to follow this blog for a long time because it is effective for the audiences who like to read any news about social media. Of course, it would be much better if it can take some annoying ads off. Moreover, I suggest it to add “about this blog” to introduce itself and move the subscription to the top of the homepage for the convenience of new audiences.