Wonderful Blog of OZ

After analyzing the journalism blog, I felt like an old pro. Well, maybe not quite. I found myself back at square one. Be an audience, be an audience. The words were running a hundred miles an hour through my mind as I searched for blogs about shopping (boring), photography (too similar to journalism), Harry Potter (I’m a big fan) and then it came to me. I am a Wizard of OZ junkie. I knew that I wasn’t the only one in love with the classic, so I began my search.

There are a lot more blogs out there regarding the Wizard of OZ than I thought there would be. Most of them were pretty strange. I was looking for a something on the more personal side of the blog. I wanted the author to share my interest in the movie and see what kind of ideas they had about it.

I came across the, “The Wonderful Blog of OZ.” The title was cute. It spun off the movie/book’s popular saying, “The Wonderful World of OZ.” So far, I was impressed and I hadn’t gotten past the title. The first thing I did before looking at the posts of the blog was just run the curser down to see what kind of material I was dealing with. I saw a lot of pictures, posts and videos. I found a keeper.

The creators of the blog had a unique background/profile. Eric is the site’s head honcho. He is a 41 year old male, not the typical OZ fan in my mind, but then again, a blog has no rules or stereotypes. He made a blog for himself. It poses as his personal OZ journal. Eric is a substitute teacher from Bainbridge Island. This blog is his journal of his experiences, sharing his successes, discoveries, and other random thoughts. Eric is an acknowledged Wizard of Oz expert and runs his own website on the subject (as posted on his profile.) Under his profile information on the OZ blog were links to other blogs. This guy is all over the place! I read his blog entitled “I am a teacher” to learn a little bit more of what he teaches. His blog on teaching is what Blood would describe as a journal. He talks about how stressful his week of teaching was and gives the readers his schedule. He keeps his teaching posts pretty regular and updates often.

Laura is the sites co-creator. She goes by the nickname Tegan and also had a listing of all of her personal blogs. As soon as I tapped into Tegan’s profile, I realized that she was Eric’s wife. I thought it was cute how they’re each other’s blog audience and maintain blogs together as well as separately. Tegan has her own blog entitled Bloggity- Blog- Blog-Blog. Wow, say that five times fast. Her subtitle: “Is the FBI interested in Laura "Tegan" Gjovaag,” was very clever. I knew I was going to enjoy my Wizard of OZ blog.

Anyway, back to reason for this whole post/assignment, The Wonderful Blog of OZ. Now that I had a little background information on Eric and Tegan I began reading the posts. Some were longer than others and some didn’t make a whole lot of sense to me. They were updated regularly, only skipping a couple days, if any. Some of the posts followed a pattern. There was a few that kept track on the process of the “OZ room.” Eric turned his room into an OZ room and posted photographs and updates of cleaning off his desk and revamping his bookshelves. He received comments from people wishing they could get their OZ paraphernalia organized and similar thoughts. He posted on the development he was making and helped his audience follow the process:

‘I've made some real progress already, but I still have that whole mess on the floor you can't quite see yet, a set of shelves to put into one of the bookcases and the doors to hang, and lots of non-Oz things (comic books and teaching materials, mostly) to figure out what to do with. But the overall shape of things is coming along, and I can start dealing with the little fiddly bits later. So it's looking good and doable, but I suspect it may get a bit cramped in here by the time I'm done.’

Through his postings of the OZ room, Eric was learning self-awareness, as Blood calls it. He was learning that he was making process to cleaning his room, while putting up pictures to remind him of what he had left to do. He even has a label entitled OZ room that can be clicked on to put all of his postings and pictures of the room together, instead of disbursed throughout the other postings of his site. I liked the little Tin Man hanging alongside his desk in one of the photographs. I want one!

The videos on the blog were what initially caught my eye. The latest video on the blog (which appears first) was a London production of Wicked that Laura found. Eric gives a brief introduction of the video, which I found a good idea instead of just throwing it in on there. He lets the audience know who the actresses in clip were, also very useful. It relates to the Wizard of OZ because the witch in Wicked is very similar to the Wicked Witch of the West in OZ. After watching the clip, I want to see the whole production!

The video clip under the title, “And now a word from our sponsors” was a commercial about shoes and ended with the infamous Ruby Slippers and key phrase, “There’s no place like home.” I left a comment under this post with my thoughts on how appropriate it was for the blog.
A few of the other youtube clips on the blog were in a different language. One doesn’t relate to OZ at all, as Eric states, however, the man in the clip is being interviewed by an OZ fan. It’s a little quirky, but it’s his blog and he can post whatever he wishes.

Of course, I can’t go on and on forever about this blog, however, as you can see, I really enjoy it. The material displayed seems endless throughout all the links available and although I realize that it isn’t just a site about OZ, OZ, OZ, but its unique and good design. Props to Eric and Tegan for making a blog worth looking at!