The Critics Have Spoken...

Yes, I am alive and well. I've just been busy with work and trying to get my place in order. Not much of interest has been happening, so I haven't had much to write about. You know how it is. Now that summer is here, it's been hard to do much of anything, especially with the sudden onslaught of heat.

One thing I did stumble across recently was a new site (at least to me) called Musebin. It's quite a neat little site that features collections of reviews some of which rival Metacritic in breadth and scope.

It's amazing to me that no one has come up with this idea before. Here's the long story: The thing that has always bugged me about Metacritic is that it's a pretty closed society. They choose a handful of new releases each week, all of the big ones are represented, and then they post short excerpts and scores from a bunch of different sources. The problem, for me, is that they always use the same sources, and only the usual suspects are represented.

This is where Musebin fills a nice niche and improves tons and tons upon the Metacritic formula. Everything on Musebin is added by users. So regular people go out and find the most insightful reviews and then post very short, Twitter-worthy excerpts plus a simple rating categorization. Users can also add their own reviews, too, within the same abbreviated guidelines.

Yes, you get some reviews that are nothing more than totally inept and useless nonsense. But you also get some nice, concise summarizations. I should set up an account, as it would be fun to contribute. Then again, given how off-again, on-again I am with blogging, well...