Background – Peer review or evaluation has been seen as a promising approach in helping students to learn from one another instead of relying solely on their overwhelmed teachers for feedback on their written work. However, there have been mixed reviews on the effectiveness of this method. This study aims to examine the effects of peer review on blogging buddies’ writing performance as well as to suggest the groundwork needed for an effective way to pair the blogging buddies to ensure that the peers can bilaterally benefit each other. Methods – A qualitative case study was conducted on eight students from a private university in Malaysia. The writing scores for three different essays (pre and post peer review) were tracked to observe its effects on the respective blogging buddies’ writing performance. Results – The findings have shown that the students’ proficiency levels played an important part in pairing the students as it impacted their writing performance and the effectiveness of the peer review activity. Poor proficiency students who were paired with average proficiency students seemed to make the greatest progress and were the most prominent beneficiaries. Even though these average students benefited from being a reviewer; this pairing was a disadvantage when they reposted their essays after peer review. For high proficiency students who were paired together, they recorded either an increased score or a same score in their post-peer writing. Conclusions – This study has shown that for peer review via weblogs to be effectively implemented in writing classes, proper groundwork needs to be laid for instructors to ensure that adequate training is provided, the peers are properly paired, and sufficient support is provided to these blogging buddies.