Team 1: Restoration Catastrophe
URL: http://restoration-catastrophe.portspace.com

Overall Impressions

Looking back through the earlier postings, it’s obvious that this team’s grasp of blogs has improved over the last couple of weeks. The first half dozen entries are all short, lack personality and lack decent titles. As time goes on, though, the length, tone, titles and writing quality improve. I’m a bit concerned with the formatting issues (particularly lack of spacing between paragraphs and differing fonts on certain entries), but those are minor points.

Reading the entries, I’m a bit perturbed that Cleanfax is mentioned in 3 different posts, but that could just be me.

Overall this is a quality blog. My gut feeling is that the categories could be put to better use (suggestions include: “Restoration Resources”, “Coach’s Commercial Restoration” and “Industry Knowledge”).

Evaluation Points
Formatting: 3/5
The team gets points for using visual stimulations such as a variety of links and bullet points; however there are a variety of formatting issues as well. They may want to consider using italics or bold in place of exclamation marks as well. Overall the formatting’s “good”.

Linking Practices: 4/5
Almost every entry has several links. This is fantastic for finding out exactly what the students are talking about. They should be commended for this behavior.

Authority: 3.5/5
The students are obviously trying to learn while also trying to blog, and this comes across. Some posts are authoritative, while others are almost shy. Overall they’re doing a great job, considering this is likely a new industry for them.

Authenticity: 3/5
The students are obviously students. While that is good, it occurs to me that perhaps the ideal restoration catastrophe industry blog might want something that sounds more professional.

Writing Quality: 3/5
There are numerous grammatical, sentence and punctuation issues scattered throughout the blog. It’s difficult to know if this is confined to one author, though, because author names are generally not included.

Frequency of Posts: 5/5
Most days have 1-2 posts. This is fantastic. Generally they are striking a good balance between content levels, content lengths and varying kinds of content. Great job!

Length of Posts: 3/5
Initially posts were too short. If I had to evaluate the first day or two of blogging, I’d give this a 2/5. However, more recently the length has been fantastic. I’d give the most recent week’s worth of postings a solid 5/5.

Relevance: 4/5
The only thing that irked me was the reference to CSI. I’m not sure if this is the kind of thing individuals in this industry would be expected to watch or not. It could be an entirely appropriate for this industry, in which case I’d give this a 5/5. I would like to see more “industry news” style information though.

Variety of Writers: 2/5
It’s simply too hard to tell who is writing where. I can hear different tones. I’m not sure if there should be identifiably different writers or not, given the type of blog this is. I’m sure people could argue it either way. However, some posts do have names, and others don’t. This is confusing.

Quality of Titles: 3/5
As mentioned in the overall review, later titles are better. Earlier titles aren’t as good. I’d expect this to improve with time. Overall, a great first few weeks on the titles front.

Total: 33.5/50