Issue 3

Welcome to the third issue of TopBlogMag!

We have a fantastic issue for you this week including an interesting look at what the author of Critique my Blog has learned from your blogs, a delightful theme inspired post by Melissa from Home In The World, a competition to become next weeks Blog Of The Week, a debate over Pay Per Post and much more.

This week’s themes are Van Gough’s ‘Café Terrace At Night’

and the on going theme of ‘write about what ever the hell you like’.

A few things of note before we delve in to this week’s issue:

1. The comments on this blog have been made DOFOLLOW which means that the Google and Technorati spiders will pick up the link to your blog when you comment – if that isn’t an incentive to leave some feedback for our writers I don’t know what is.
2. In our left sidebar we now have a blogroll link to all our writers blogs as well as the links to all the posts they have written for us – which means our writers are getting even more links from us!
3. We have added a Blog Review this week and intend to make it a weekly feature
4. We have added this blog to Spicy Pages and Fuel My blog, the more votes you give us and the more readers we get, ultimately, the more people read your posts visit your sites. So get voting!

As usual, all posts on this page are part of this weeks issue, so scroll right down to the bottom, leave comments for the writers (remembering that all comments are now DOFOLLOW so will be picked up by the googlebots) and click over to view the blogs of the readers you like; and don’t forget to go and see Skittles, this weeks Blog Of The Week for sending us the most unique hits during last week and tell her TopBlogMag sent you.

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Next weeks themes are ‘revenge’ and of course, the ever present ‘write about what the hell you like’.

To take part in next weeks issue please send your entries to topblogmag(at)gmail.com no later than 12 midnight GMT on Friday and please, please, please read the rules before sending us your entry. (To find out what time this is where you live click here, Hint: GMT is 0)

Amaze us, inspire us, tell us something we didn’t already know, make us laugh, cry or think, but, most importantly, entertain us. Make us want to read more, want to get to know you, visit your blog and come back for more. Remember this is free advertising for your blog, wow us.

Cafe Terrace At Night

Written by Mr Big W from Working Without A Net

One would usually think of Paris or a similar French town or village upon seeing Van Gogh’s ‘Café Terrace at Night.’ Me? Not so much. The first thing that came to mind for me was a weekend spent in Lucerne, Switzerland nearly 20 years ago.

I was dating a lovely Swiss girl while stationed in Neu Ulm, Germany, back in the early 90s. We would see each other on weekends whenever she came to visit several friends in the area. She invited me and a few of my friends to visit her at her parents’ home – a stunning condo with views of Lake Lucerne and the Alps, specifically Mounts Pilatus and Riga. The views from the balcony were (and I am limited in my ability to provide an accurate description) awe-inspiring to say the least. I half-expected Julie Andrews to be running down the hillside singing about hills being alive and filled with music. I think we even sang a quick rendition of do, re, mi while quaffing pints of heffeweiss.

Our first night in town was spent at a local gasthaus drinking and just enjoying the time away from our barracks. I really just remember not having to be anywhere or do anything and relishing in the moment. The following morning, after a continental breakfast of fruits and breads and strong, strong coffee, we made our way downtown, where we spent several hours just walking around; our hosts providing an impromptu tour. I may be biased but I imagine no one had prettier or friendlier guides than the four of us.

Around midday, we stopped along the Reuss River to take in the scenery. For a mid-February day, it was very mild and rather than sit inside one of the establishments lining the river, we opted to take our drinks river-side. Time passed at once very slowly as we took in everything around us and quickly as we realized we had been sitting there for over three hours. We talked about everything and nothing. We remarked that there were no ugly people in this town – everyone was a GQ or Elle cover model – and how they must all be stopped at the German border. Swans swam their way up to us, boldly searching out snacks and posing for pictures. We even got caught up in a Fasching parade that ran the length of the river. I imagine we were a fairly amusing sight to everyone sitting at the outside cafes.

We walked around more and made our way to that hill I expected to see Julie on and staged our own re-enactment. I have mentioned we spent three hours drinking, right? Back at the condo, we had a delicious dinner and spent the remainder of the evening out on the balcony drinking coffee and admiring the view.

We left the next morning, dreading the return to the dreariness of our military lives. It was one of the best weekends I ever spent while in the army. It was filled with good food, good drink and, most importantly, good friends. And that is why, nearly 20 years later, I remember it as if it were yesterday.

Not Quite April in Paris

Written by Melissa from Home In The World

At the age of thirty-seven she realized she'd never ride
through Paris in a sports car with the warm wind in her hair…

In my early 30s, I heard The Ballad of Lucy Jordan on the radio. It is a song about realizing that your life is a lot less than you expected. I had never heard it before and I haven’t heard it since, but I scribbled those two lines on a sticky note and buried them in a pocket of my planner.

At the time I was working for a foreign language publisher. My colleagues were smart, creative people, but were forever beginning their sentences with “When I lived in Paris…,” “When I was studying in Barcelona…,” “On my trip to Portugal….” I had studied French a total of ten years from Kindergarten through college, but never had the opportunity to do the semester abroad like so many of my colleagues. My sense of accomplishment has always been tied up in the places I’ve been and by carrying those lyrics with me, I was saying “Please don’t let that be me.”

In truth, I was making progress in my career, I learned much from the publishing job; traveled to different states, met authors and teachers from many cultures, sampled different ethnic cuisine and a lot of fine wine, found focus. I started work on a Masters degree. My husband and I bought a house, traveled to Alaska and Hawaii, and began the debate over children and adoption.

Some years later, while planning our first adoption trip to Russia, the travel agent, who had worked with adopting families before, suggested an itinerary that involved a twenty-three hour layover in Paris. “I’ll find a nice little hotel, you can have dinner in Paris. A lot of couples do it. It is like a mini-vacation before the baby comes home.”

After the harrowing experience that was our first trip to Russia, I was thankful for this small retreat in a city I had read and learned about all my life. As the taxi zipped us from the airport to the heart of Paris, the stress left my shoulders, my smile returned.

Our hotel was blocks from the Louvre. We had dinner at a small sidewalk café, then walked for hours in the neighborhood, getting a glimpse of La Tour Eiffel from a distance, getting a little lost, getting acquainted with Paris. Then once again we crossed the courtyard of the Louvre, and returned to our hotel, exhausted but unable to sleep….

After breakfast we began with a stroll in the Tuileries. It was late March, not quite April in Paris, but \warm with the trees sprouting tiny leaves. A student approached us, looking for the Metro. “Je suis Americaine,” I started to apologize, momentarily flattered to be mistaken for a French woman. But then I spotted a Metro station out of the corner of my eye and was able to help him after all.

We dashed from the Eiffel Tower to the Arc de Triomphe, walked along the Seine and got as close to Notre Dame as time allowed. We didn’t actually go into anything, with only hours between breakfast and our departure, it was literally a whirlwind tour.

But however brief, the time spent in Paris was an extraordinary gift. A world I had known only through books or a movie screen came to life before my eyes. It was truly magical. Getting there once somehow meant that I could always come back.

My husband said he had rarely seen me happier. I was thirty-six.

What I've Learned

Written By Bill from Critique My blog

I started critiquing blogs in August of 2006 as a way to break into this whole blog explosion that was taking the internet by storm. I didn't want to write a blog about myself, and the only other topic I knew about was pest control, both of which I thought others would find boring. So I thought about a way to help people and write at the same time, and it was here that Critique My Blog was born.

I decided to format it where bloggers would submit their blog to me and I'd place a review and their link right on the post with the hopes it would direct traffic their way. In returned I asked that they also place a link on their blog to bring more bloggers my way. I cringe when I say that is was more or less a link exchange.

Then came the bloggers. Bloggers who wrote about their hobbies, their work, their lives. I was reading the personal diary of people around the globe and they were asking for me to critique that. It was something I never took lightly and unless the blog was horrible, my reviews and critiques pointed out the positives rather than the negatives and I'd write the review with a tone of promotion, encouraging the readers to visit the blog I was reviewing.. I wanted those bloggers to be read.

It became clear that there is so much talent out there and this was an outlet that people from all over the world were using to express their creativity. It was also becoming clear that people were using this means of expression as a therapeutic way to express their feelings and problems that they were facing in their day to day lives.

Something that started as a link exchange became a crusade to promote bloggers and their talents. I wanted to raise awareness of the fantastic blogs that were submitted to my inbox and written about on my blog. These were people who deserved some attention and I was trying, in my own little way, to help them get it.

I guess when I ask myself what I've learned from the bloggers I've critiqued I'd have to say that they are some of the hardest working, caring, creative, and opinionated bunch of writers this world will ever know. This sub-culture of bloggers started out as a gimmick but has turned into a voice.

Blog Review

We thought we would add a little blog review section to TopBlogMag and so to find our first victim lucky blogger I spent some time surfing to find a random great blog to tell you all about.

And I found it.

Whilst wondering through mybloglog I came across Tiny Voices In My Head and was instantly drawn in. It was something to do with the clean, easy to navigate layout which she designed herself, the lack clutter in the sidebar, the simple colour scheme and then, of course, there was the writing.

Open, honest and unpretentious, you can’t help feeling like you’ve known Webmiztris forever and that you are sitting opposite her in the bar, drink in hand, listening to her share her thoughts and rants about her day with you. Her conversational tone, scathing wit and no holds barred style had me at the bottom of the page and looking for more before I knew what was going on; I wanted to know more about this guitar strummin’, beach dreamin’, never fittin’ in.

There were a couple of negative points about her blog, but these were purely to do with the design. Once at the bottom, hungry for more, there was no ‘older posts’ button to take me further on, I had to scroll back up and click through her archives section. Then, after spending a little time reading through her archives, there was no home button or clickable header to take me back to the beginning. These however are not big issues and certainly wouldn’t stop me from visiting again - in fact I’ve added her to my blog roll, and if that doesn’t tell you how much I enjoyed it then I don’t know what does.

So go on, pop on over and take a look, leave her some comments and don’t forget to tell her TopBlogMag sent you.

What great blogs have you discovered this week? Tell us a little about them.

Picture Competition

These are all photos of household objects taken close up. Can you tell what they are?


Going left to right and top to bottom leave your answers to all 8 in the comments below and win the Blog Of The Week spot for your blog next week.

The winner will be chosen at random from the correct answers.

Cafe Terrace At Night

Written by Bob

This is where I come to write.

Well, not at night you understand, for it would be considered terribly improper and unsociable in these parts to sit alone being studious when the sun has dropped below the horizon; besides, nothing I write would be legible the next morning, as a man sat alone in a café of an evening is an open invite to all to pour copious amounts of red wine down his throat.

So it is sometime around midmorning, when the waiters have finished hosing down the pavements from the night before and laying out the tables outside just so, when the specials have all been written up by hand and the board propped up outside the door and the smell of freshly brewing coffee wafts around the village on the breeze greeting you and drawing you in, that I find myself here, coffee cup in one hand, pen in the other and deep frown etched onto my forehead.

It is where I come to fill these dauntingly blank pieces of paper with words; to try to herd all of those thoughts and ideas wandering around inside my head in to some form of order and then coax them down on to paper, trapping them there in that inky prison before they can escape. More often than not it is a like trying to herd sheep through a marsh. There is always one that gets stuck, that stands in fear of being committed to paper bleating at you tantalisingly in the distance; but you know, if you go back for it and dig it out you run the very real risk of losing all the others, of coming back to find that they have scattered, gotten lost or fallen off the cliff without your guidance to keep them going. And so you leave it to its watery grave and turn your attention to the others, making sure that no more get lost on the long journey from brain to paper.

Several cups of coffee and later, the sheep that could be saved safely captured in note book, it is time to reward a mornings hard brow-furrowing with a trip to buy the same newspaper from the same shrivelled old woman who still treats me like a perfect stranger every time I see her, despite buying the same paper from her every day for the last 5 years, and then maybe stop for a quick cup of coffee on the way home for my siesta.

The day she acknowledges me is the day I’ll know the village has finally accepted me as a local.

It’s worth the wait.

Selling your soul or getting what's due?

At first you would see the odd pay per post article dotted here and there around the blogosphere and then slowly but surely their numbers started to increase and now it seems like every second or third blog you visit is sporting them. So now that they really are everywhere, what do you think about them? Are you sick to death of seeing them or thinking of joining them?

Are they a cancer turning bloggers into greedy money-hungry corporate zombies? Or is it a brilliant way to make some cash without covering your site in add banners as Chad W Smith tells us in his short but concise summing up of why he loves Pay Per Post? Is it a case of the corporate world paying you a pittance for telling their lies or a great way to give your honest opinion, in your own words, about the product in question?

Do you believe the policy disclosures that posties put up on their site saying that they really do believe the product they are selling is great or not?

Have you noticed a decline in the quality of non PPP posts of your favourite blogs?

Are you of the opinion that you can always just not read the PPP posts if you don’t like them and don’t see what all the fuss is about?

Are you a postie that is sick and tired of people assuming you have sold out for a quick buck?

Are you thinking of joining the postie ranks but worried it is going to affect your readership?

What do you think?