robinson and pepys

i have now spent time on both nick robinson and samuel pepys' blog sites. very different sites and different experiences reading through them and going through the blogs and internal links. the pepys' blog is extremely dense in terms of information and contributors who add their annotations and seem to know a thing or two about pepys. very different to the contributors to robinson's site who seem to know how to blabber on quite a lot and repeat well worn 'arguments'. pepys' blog is quite a historical document, being a transcript text of his diaries recorded for digital distribution by project gutenberg. this is at first difficult to get your head around because in consideration it really is an upload of diairies written over 400 years ago and so not really a blog in the contemporary sense. you have to suspend your sense of time displacement, but it is quite interesting, though very niche market, for those interested in history of london at that time and pepys himself. however, i like the ability of readers to contribute annotations to the blog space and add information. that seems to work well with more people adding more factual info and asides. it is a very well put together and researched blog site, you have to read through the about section to understand the context of the blog/diaries. whereas with robinson's blog you do not necessarily have to do that, you can just dive right in and start adding contributions, it feels more open in that sense to me, the pepys' blog felt more specialised. two very different sites and interests groups. the robinson blog feels quite 'light' compared to the pepys' blog site and oddly enough quite inconsequential. it really does seem like a conversation site with all and sundry joining in, robinson doesn't appear at all like the political 'tv expert'. my preference would be to enter a contribution to the robinson site because i feel i have an opinion on contemporary politics and not pepys as such. the pepys site i would use as a historical document for further research.