Peer review social networks 2.0

Social networks 2.0
http://dobelievethehyve.wordpress.com/
Review by Tamara Bakker

For this week’s assignment we had to write a peer review about a blog of our fellow students. After looking at all the different blogs I selected the blog of http://dobelievethehyve.wordpress.com/ because the topic interested me and I would like to get to know more about it.

Layout
The first thing I looked at was the layout of the blog. The layout of a blog is very important because it gives you your first impression. When only looking at the layout of the blog the subject of the blog should be clear. In this case it is. The title on top of the page ‘social networks 2.0’ says it all. The picture of the honeycomb illustrating the title immediately caught my eye. In my opinion this picture is wisely chosen for this blog. It represents the social network sites where everybody puts their part of the information online. Together this forms a whole, just like the bees do with the honeycomb. A wise choice of the image!
Secondly my attention is drawn to the four columns the blog is divided in. I think this is a very smart move of the makers of this blog. In this way they create order in their blog and this makes navigating and reading very easy. One critical point here is the organization of the content in the columns. The group members tell who they are and what their assessment is in the third column. In my opinion they better could have placed this information in the first column.

Content
Looking at the content of the blog, the first thing that I notice is that the blog makers have been very active. They have gathered a lot of information and video’s about their subject. This shows that they are very committed to their blog. Unfortunately the activeness of the makers stops when there are no more assignments to be done. Although this isn’t very surprising, it is causing the blog to be outdated. When no new messages will appear on the blog, this will not motivate the visitors to come back.
The information given on the blog is very complete. A lot of different aspects of Hyves are being discussed. Especially the subject of cross media action is being well discussed. These articles show a lot of possibilities for Hyves in the future.
A very interesting post is the one about how social media can contribute to news reporting. This is, in my opinion, a very realistic aspiration for the future. I think this is a very effective way to use Hyves.

Final grade
The makers of this blog have done a very good job in gathering all the information, writing the articles and putting all this information together in a blog. They have created a very good total view of the possibilities for Hyves in the future. As a final grade I would therefore like to give this blog a 8,5.