Critique

The blog I'm going to introduce is called "Baghdad Burning".

This is a political blog created by a girl from Iraq and her name is anonymous. Most content in this blog is about war, politics and sometimes occupation. Therefore, I think its target audience is those people whose are interested in politics or intellectuals. It has been blogging for 4 years since 2003 and it is one of the ten-most-popular blog in the world. For this blog, the blogger usually updates the blog item once a month and the recent journal was posted in 6th September.

I know this blog just because of one of Minehan's assignments. As we need to analysis this blog and a academic article, it gives me the first time to read this blog. I basically had thinking that this blog must be boring as it is a politic journalistic blog. However, after my first time to read the post, I found what she wrote is very interesting and those posts always make me think a lot.

I like this blog because this blog contains a lot of her voice and feelings. There is no something general or clichés that we all know even without reading her posts. The lastly post can be used for instance. In the lastly post, it was about a driver's (who she knows) brother have been killed by shooting when she was planning to leave Iraq with her family. She said, "The trip was long and uneventful, other than two checkpoints being run by masked men. They asked to see identification, took a cursory glance at the passports and asked where we were going". This was her experience and it tells the viewers know how she felt. Another post contains a lot of her voice is the post released in 20th Feb, 2007 about the rape of Sabrine, she wrote, "I hate the media and I hate the Iraqi government for turning this atrocity into another Sunni-Shia debacle- like it matters whether Sabrine is Sunni or Shia or Arab or Kurd (the Al Janabi tribe is composed of both Sunnis and Shia)". She strongly expressed her opinion on this official scandal. I like to know how people judge some particular issues or news.

Another reason why I like this blog a lot is because this blog provides many source about the Iraq War that I don't know or I couldn't watch from television or newspapers. As her position is very clear - anti-Bush and anti-war, she offers some sources in terms of links to other website. For example, there is a link called "Iraq Body Count", can we see it from television? No for sure. The figure in some ways reflects the fact that the invasion to Iraq by the American troops cost many Iraq people's life. I like this website because it provides a lot of useful information for me especially about politics. In addition, it certainly influences me how to judge the Iraq War. Besides, she is also likely to quote some sentence from online newspapers and those quotes can be linked to the original sources such as Yahoo News and the New York times.

For this blog, the layout is simple. The left side is the area for posts and the right hand side is a linking area. In addition, users are not allowed to comment. Although there is a link provided to send mail to the blogger, other users couldn't read the comments from others on each post. In other words, users are unable to share their opinion and feelings; the blogger is the only person to make expression in this blog.

Overall, I like this blog a lot and it became one of my favorite blog. I will keep visiting this blog and hope the blogger keep posting nice articles.