Grumpy Cunts critical evaluation

The idea of Grumpy Cunts was based on the book Is It Me Or Is Everything Shit? - in that we would all write about mundane things, people and places that just irritated us. We also wanted to do this in a way that was entertaining for the reading and functional. There isn't really a blog on the Internet that does what we did in a similar way. We tried to explore different ways of conveying our message, whether that was through pictures or YouTube videos and the like. This blog was different to print in the sense that this kind of thing could not constitute a whole magazine dedicated to it, almost in the same way as Lifehacker wouldn't work as a magazine. Our name would also be highly unprintable!

Our goals were as follows:

• One person to post once each day, therefore making 30 posts in the week.
• To keep the posts at a good length.
• Entertaining the reader.

The audience we decided to target was a quite a general audience, since this really isn't subject specific. That's why I think a blog like this would have the potential to be really successful, as opposed to many subject-specific blogs.

The blog was set up and we decided to go for a simple layout, since Blogger doesn't really offer much in the way of good templates. Adam made us a fantastic looking banner that seperates us from the competition easily. The actual job of posting was pretty straightforward and fairly smooth. Everyone posted when they needed to and our target post count for the week was easily met.

I also decided not to have many house style guidelines, because I felt it would be too restrictive on all of us, so I just said:

• Word length of 250-500 words.
• At least one picture or one video in the blog post.

I was checking the posts and editing any grammatical mistakes to ease the pressure on my writers. This was hard for me, seeing as I had to edit a lot of posts! But at the end of the day, it has to be done.

I think things that could have been differently are as follows:

• A general introduction post - I think that, whilst you can argue that our banner explained it in a nutshell, a proper introductionary post would have helped potential readers a bit more.
• Line space formatting - it's not really a problem with us, it's just Blogger being a pain in the backside.
• More tags - I thought that we should just have limited tags to at least one, but if anyone wanted to add more then I shouldn't stop them, but I think the more tags you have (not too much!), the more easier your blog is to navigate. So I probably should have made a more stricter tags guideline.

My own posts were pretty easy subjects when writing it, but also off-the-cuff. I didn't really think of the subjects until things happened during the day for me to take inspiration from. I also probably could have been adding a bit more YouTube. The other bloggers made some great posts and it was enjoyable reading them all. It makes feel satisfied as a comissioner for me to read such good material!

In summary, the blog worked very well. This was primarally because the subject of the blog was simple and general, yet affective. I think the improvements mentioned above are the only things I would consider improving on because it was a very smooth blog and fully functioning.