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My favourites are Signal vs. Noise and Daring Fireball. SvN is about "entrepreneurship, design, experience, simplicity, constraints, pop culture, our products, products we like, and more" by 37signals, a company that makes web apps I like. I read it regularly because I'm a big fan of their design philosophy. DF is all about Mac nerdery.
Those two are the blogs I visit most regularly. I don't hang on their every word though, and my blog reading habits overall are generally sporadic. It also depends on whether I'm on holidays or during semester, etc. I'll go through phases of checking certain blogs daily, then ignore them for months at a time.
If I feel like reading something humanities related that is up-to-date and relevant, I might start at crooked timber or if I'm feeling esoteric, here. If I want Op-eds, I'll go here (more like an aggregate of blogs).
I sometimes check in to see design blogs like, say, Design Observer. There is also this one, which is by one of my tutors; I really love it, but calling it my 'favourite blog' would be disingenuous since I don't visit it very regularly.
I don't read personal blogs (unless, say, things like Lyrhawn's movie review blog count). My friends generally don't keep them, and the few who do use livejournal and xanga, neither of which I have any respect for. At least they don't use Myspace. Please write this into your article: Myspace's design is atrocious, and that website has single-handedly set back the movement towards good web design and coding standards by at least half a decade.
A lot of web content out there is lying in blogs, but usually I arrive at them from other webpages, fora, or news sites. I just do what I need to do to find the best content as fast as possible, and I find that subscribing to a handful of good blogs isn't the best way.
I do have a blog of my own (on wordpress.com - the only free blogging platform that has some semblance of respect for good web design), where I review movies and write the occasional non-fiction piece. It's mostly just a fix for my urge to write while my fully fledged page is in the works. There is something about the immediacy of blogging that appeals to the less than patient, such as myself.
I use the blog in conjunction with an account I have on a user-submitted news site, so I can usually spark a discussion or two from a post. Getting feedback is rewarding and helps me keep going, but I also have a desire to improve my non-fiction writing and make a regular habit of publishing something. So even when the comments dry up, I keep writing.
Hope that helps. Sorry for rambling on.
[Edit to fix some of the more atrocious grammatical errors]
posted
The horrendous design of myspace and other personal blogging sites is why you should use RSS to read peoples' blogs. You don't see the formatting, only the text and pictures. You don't have to repeatedly check the website--the reader will tell you when there is new content.
I read a lot of science blogs and some other general interest ones. Lifehacker has tons of interesting tips for making life easier. Many are computer related, but not all.
I started blogging because I was going to go on a trip and I wanted to have a way to tell my friends and family about it as well as keep a record for myself. I started it a bit before the trip and updated pretty frequently while I was there. I haven't really posted anything after the trip-related stuff, though. I may revive it at some point to talk about something else if I think it will be interesting. It's at shigosei.blogspot.com if you want to read it.
Posts: 3546 | Registered: Jul 2002
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quote:Please write this into your article: Myspace's design is atrocious, and that website has single-handedly set back the movement towards good web design and coding standards by at least half a decade.
*snort* Euripides, you're a prince among peasants. And yeah, please ramble. Seriously. Thanks for the info.
Thanks for the links, Euripides and Shigosei. This is what I'm looking for.
Quid, I can't seem to find the thread you started about your new publication. Is it a print magazine, or online?
Posts: 1762 | Registered: Apr 2006
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I read my livejournal friend page quite often, as I'm in a large number of communities (mostly grad school & academia related, such as applyingtograd, gradstudents, acad_anon, etc.
Another blog I check out is www.marginalrevolution.com, as it always have fun posts on economics, philosophy, ethnic cuisine, and books I probably ought to be reading. Also keeps me up to date on the trends and arguments happening among economists in academia. It's written by a professor of econ at George Mason.
I also occasionally read dooce.com and http://www.jacquelinepassey.com/blog/. I would never want to have either woman's life, but I find it an interesting peek into a different reality.
Finally, I also occasionally look at the blogs of other econ grad school applicants, and the blogs of other econ graduate students or professors.
Posts: 2409 | Registered: Sep 2003
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My favorites, honestly, are mommy blogs. I've made a large group of friends who all kind of read each other's blogs, and I love that these women who I've never met care what happens to me and my family and I care about them and theirs.
So I guess blogging's kind of a quote-unquote "networking" thing for me; a way to connect with other women with similar lives and/or lifestyles and/or interests (and definitely senses of humor about mommyhood) that I would never find in my community (the mommies here tend to be on a different wavelength from me.)
That probably didn't help. Sorry I'm so boring. Posts: 21182 | Registered: Sep 2004
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I read a fair number of political blogs, out of which MyDD.com is probably my favorite. The Mystery Pollster (pollster.com) is another excellent political blog, providing insight into polling and statistics, and generally being super-informative about the modern political arena.
I also follow several entertainment blogs, including Whedonesque.com (all things Joss Whedon) and Kotaku.com (gaming), as well as the personal blogs of some individual writers I enjoy, such as WilWheaton.net, Dooce.com, and NeilGaiman.com.
Posts: 1321 | Registered: Sep 1999
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Even though most of my comments are prevented from being posted (disability rights critics are considered more objectionable than Christian Conservative ones, or so I assume since they get to post whatever they want)is the "left-wing" bioethics blog, bioethics.net
A blog that is probably of interest only to people in the Chicago area is the one by Mike Miner, who covers the media - Chicago mostly, but also national: News bitesPosts: 4344 | Registered: Mar 2003
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There are some other ones on scienceblogs.com that are good, but there are also some on there that aren't so good.
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I've personally grown to love Deep End Dining and Adella Cosplay (she's like the only cosplayer that looks REALLY ridiculously good in her outfits).
Posts: 3389 | Registered: Apr 2004
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I tend to stick to personal blogs, because I get a kick out of anonymously nosing in on the lives of others. The only blogs I try to keep up with are Click Opera and David Byrne's jounal, I tend to agree with a lot they have to say about various events and subjects, and reading them it feels like they are able to articulate my own ideas better than I could. Otherwise, I just enjoy reading what they have to say or recommend.
I'm also very entertained by the way they relate their day-to-day observations, and chances are they get me thinking a bit about some of those little daily details and then influence the way I take them in. They just generally operate on a wavelength that's easy for me to tune into, so their words feel very warm and familiar.
[ February 21, 2007, 05:02 AM: Message edited by: The Flying Dracula Hair ]
Posts: 299 | Registered: Jan 2007
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I love Steve Yegge's blog. He's a programmer who works for Google these days (but never speaks for Google) who has a hilarious and insightful take on all sorts of aspects of programming, programming languages, and being a programmer. I have no idea how well his humor plays for nontechnical readers, but a good post by him leaves me laughing insanely
He also does occasional nontechnical posts (e.g. he did one on anime) and serious posts (like one on his late brother). And he often touches on larger issues in life in the midst of a technical topic.
I find his perspectives both entertaining and interesting, and I think I'm a smarter and happier person for having read him.
Last year I started a blog of my own on livejournal. I've long kept a paper journal, and on a whim I figured I might like to share some of my ramblings with other people too. (The url is in my profile if you want to be bored by it ). Writing, whether in a blog or in my paper journal, helps me organize my thoughts and get a different perspective on things. The benefit of a blog is that you also get feedback sometimes. My blog gets very little traffic these days (just an occasional friend, or even more rarely a wandering lj user) but when it does happen it's nice to hear what someone else thinks.
Posts: 120 | Registered: Jun 2005
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