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The UK Sunday newspaper The Observer recently published a list of the world’s 50 most powerful blogs. kottke.org is fourth on the list. “Powerful” seems to be a word used here for its succinct headline value…that adjective doesn’t fit many of the blogs on the list. But The Observer has made an effort to build a wide-ranging list of blogs that you should be reading…it’s very nice to be included.
In case you’re wondering if Kottke is blogging this week.
(A nice addition to Jason’s list of Single Serving Sites.)
Update: Brought to us — ironically? — by, Jason.
Apperceptive, the little engine that runs a large chunk of the professional blogosphere, gets a nice shout-out from Talking Points Memo’s Josh Marshall.
One other point I should note: because of our size and resources, we’ve never been able to field close to the hardware resources behind the site as would be called for with the scale of traffic we get (to give you a sense, we now regularly get traffic equal to what we got on election night 2006, and almost four times what we got on election night 2004). That’s required some custom tinkering to keep our blog train from going off the server rails. Now, we’ve gotten some nice praise recently for the stuff our team has published at TPM. But literally none of it would be possible without the engine the folks at Apperceptive have built for us that keeps the words streaming off our keyboards on to your computer screens.
An official decision has been reached in the Long Bet between Dave Winer and Martin Nisenholtz of the NY Times. The bet was made in 2002 when Winer asserted that:
In a Google search of five keywords or phrases representing the top five news stories of 02007, weblogs will rank higher than the “New York Times” Web site
Winer won the bet but it’s worth noting that the Times has a growing stable of good blogs itself. (via workbench)
Let’s talk Antarctica blogs.
Antarctic Journal is one of the best; it’s written by a grad student studying penguin ecology. Big Dead Place is also great (but not strictly a blog); check out the stories and interviews section. Also of note but of varying quality and timeliness are a blog by the British Antarctic Survey, John Bean’s Antarctica blog, a U of Delaware blog, Antarctic Blog, and Antarctica Blog.
I’m still looking forward to the SOUTH expedition blog whenever that happens.
Update: One more: 75 Degrees South. Very nice photos, as in this post. (thx, pete)
Update: More Antarctica blogs and such: UAB in Antarctica, Blog Rogers (which includes info about the book, Antarctica: Life on the Ice), Nathan Duke, elisfanclub, Concordia Base, Base Dumont d’Urville, Mr Rose Géophy CZT45, and Andrill. (thx, everyone)
91-year-old NPR man Daniel Schorr has had it up to here with you kids and your internets. [Warning, print link to avoid stupid registration window.]
Q: In some commentaries, you touch on the latest journalistic trends, sometimes in not so complimentary a way. Such as blogs and citizen journalism. Is this a form of news gathering that you embrace?
A: I can’t embrace it. Not after what I’ve been through at the hands of the copy editors’ desks. I have suffered many, many arguments about what I’ve wanted to say — whether it was grammatically correct, factually correct and all of that — and I want everybody to have to experience what I experienced. But today, your blogger is totally free. He is his own reporter, his own editor, his own publisher, and he can do whatever he wants.
A person like me who believes in the tradition of a discipline in journalism can only rue the day we’ve arrived at where we don’t need discipline or anything. All you need is a keyboard.
He suffered, so you should too, you undisciplined mouthers-off! Update: A reader writes: “You are not giving the man the respect he deserves. He did not suffer—he honed his craft in an environment that expected professionalism, balance and honesty. What is unfortunate today is that today’s professional media are not held to the same standards. Most, if not all bloggers, do not rise to the quality of a Daniel Schorr. Unfortunately, neither do most of his younger colleagues.”
When I go back and read journalism from the ’70s and ’80s, I can see that there has been little, if any, innovation in the form since. But! While they may not be drastically “new,” there are at least two bits of excitement in internet journalism today that seem somewhat radical. First, Brian Lam at Gizmodo talks overtly about the twisted relationship between tech companies and journalists. (“As one reporter put it while chiding me, ‘Journalists are guests in the houses of these companies.’ Not first and foremost! We are the auditors of companies and their gadgets on behalf of the readers.”) And over on another Gawker Media blog (my former employer, and one that I have deeply conflicted feelings about), Jezebel’s Tracie Egan writes an astounding and reallly not for the faint-of-heart (or crotch) account of schtupping this guy she met in Vegas. It’s BANANAS. And probably NSFW. And a great read.
For a long time, I wanted to write a profile of the designer Tom Ford—and I realized the only way to do so properly would be to have sex with him and write about it. I sent an emissary to him; he declined the opportunity. I was relieved.
Rogers Cadenhead has beaten me to the punch in calculating the winner of the Dave Winer/Martin Nisenholtz Long Bet pitting the NY Times vs. blogs to see who ranks higher in end of the year search results for the 5 most important news stories of 2007. The winner? Wikipedia.
The Times has really improved their position in Google since 2005…opening up their archives helped, I bet.
Rex has released his list of the Best Blogs of 2007 That You’re (Maybe) Not Reading over at Fimoculous. Like last year, he’s focused his best-of-blogs list on lesser-known sites instead of the biggies, a strategy I applaud. In fact, he doesn’t even need to qualify the list as the best unknown blogs; many of the well-known blogs that usually make best-of lists, much of the Technorati Top 100, and most multi-author plastered-with-ads blogs are unremarkable…too much volume, too calculated, too focused on filling post and pageview quotas, and limited passion. If you look at the sites on Rex’s list, you’ll see a lot of blogs done by people who are passionate about something, not writing for a paycheck.
Rex’s #1 choice is an inspired one and absolutely right on…Twitter and Tumblr revitalized personal publishing in the eyes of many who had either tired of blogging or had never seen the point in it in the first place. My only complaint about the list is that there are too many one-hit wonders on it, sites that are worth a chuckle or squee! when you first see them but don’t hold up over time unless you really really like, say, snowclones. Oh, and Vulture…I really wanted to like it but really didn’t get it. (Oh oh, and and Jezebel? Being against a thing is not the same as standing for something.)
Anyone in a coining mood? If one doesn’t already exist, there needs to be a term for writing a blog comment or Twitter update, thinking better of it, and then discarding it by closing the browser tab without clicking “Post”. As in: “Jason, I would have responded to this post in the comments, but I ________ it instead.” Any ideas?
Warning, RSSoterica and kottke.org sausage-making to follow. Matt Wood has a post up on 43Folders about how he groups his RSS feeds in Google Reader for easier reading. I use pretty much the same system as Matt, but with a few more folders. I have several folders for reading long-form blogs:
Always
Often
Sometimes
Pending
Food and Drink
Frippery
Infoglut
Always, Often, and Sometimes are self-explanatory. The Pending folder is for blogs that I’m trying out, Frippery is stuff that is non-kottke.org-related to be read during non-work hours (ha!), and the Infoglut folder contains a bunch of blogs that have a low signal-to-noise ratio and are too high volume to keep up with unless everything else is read (any multi-author pro blogs that I read (not many) are in here). For organizing non-long-form blogs, I use these folders:
Links
Yummy
Photos
Tumble
Links contains link blogs, Yummy has a bunch of stuff from del.icio.us, Photos are photoblogs, and Tumble contains tumblelogs, FFFFOUND!, and other Randomly Curated Other People’s Images White Background Sites. And then for news, I have an NY Times folder, a Sci/Tech News folder, and a Keywords folder for Google News keyword searches.
All this folder business might seem overcomplicated, but I find that grouping feeds by mode helps greatly. And by mode, I mean when I’m reading link blogs, that’s a different style than reading/skimming long-form blogs in the Always folder. Posts from link blogs usually take a few seconds to read/evaluate/discard while the Always folder posts take longer. If they were all lumped together, I couldn’t get through them as quickly and thoroughly as I can separately. A juggling analogy will help — Wait! Don’t leave, I’m almost done! — it’s easier to juggle balls or clubs or knives than it is to juggle balls, knives, and clubs at the same time…same thing with different kinds of blog posts.
Entire Blogosphere Stunned By Blogger’s Special Weekend Post.
Cartoonist Scott Adams is going to be blogging a lot less on The Dilbert Blog because it’s bad for business.
I hoped that people who loved the blog would spill over to people who read Dilbert, and make my flagship product stronger. Instead, I found that if I wrote nine highly popular posts, and one that a reader disagreed with, the reaction was inevitably “I can never read Dilbert again because of what you wrote in that one post.” Every blog post reduced my income, even if 90% of the readers loved it. And a startling number of readers couldn’t tell when I was serious or kidding, so most of the negative reactions were based on misperceptions.
(thx, hurty elbow)
Your Daily Awesome, one of my favorite new blogs of the past few months, has ceased publication. Alas. But I can identify with the reason behind the shuttering:
I am a writer first and an artist second (or vice versa, it’s hard to keep track): Blogging is not my main gig, and for the past several months, I’ve been unable to devote myself to my real work so that I can noodle around on the internet every night, hunting for something appropriately awesome to blog. Those (substantial) daily chunks of time need to be applied to other projects that are more significant to me, creatively and professionally.
This blog is collecting pictures of men who look like old lesbians. More amusing than I thought it would be.
Andy Baio is leaving Upcoming and Yahoo to blog full-time at waxy.org. Huzzah and good luck!
There are indications that Google is changing their PageRank algorithm, possibly to penalize sites running paid links or too many cross-promotional links across blog networks. Affected sites include Engadget, Forbes, and Washington Post. Even Boing Boing, which I think had been at 9, is down to 7. You can check a site’s PR here.
Depending on the site, 30-40% of a site’s total traffic can come from search engines, much of that from Google. It will be interesting to see how much of an impact the PR drop will have on their traffic and revenue. (thx, my moon my mann)
Update: Just got the following from the editor of a site that got its PR bumped down. He says:
Two weeks ago I lost 80% of my search traffic due to, I believe, using ads from Text-Link-Ads, which does not permit the “nofollow” attribute on link ads. That meant an overall drop of more than 44% of my total traffic. It also meant a 65%-95% drop in Google AdSense earnings per day and a loss of PageRank from 7 to 6.
He has removed the text links from his site and is negotiating with Google for reinstatement but estimates a loss in revenue of $10,000 for the year due to this change. And this is for a relatively small site…the Engadget folks must be freaking out.
RU Sirius asks: Is the net good for writers? Ten professional writers weigh in.
I like to develop topics, approach them from different, often contradictory angles, and most of all, I like to polish the shit out of them so that the flow and the prose shine and bedazzle. On and offline, I find the internet-driven pressure to make pieces short, data-dense, and crisply opinionated — as opposed to thoughtful, multi-perspectival, and lyrical — rather oppressive, leading to a certain kind of superficial smugness as well as general submission to the forces of reference over reflection. I do enjoy writing 125-word record reviews though!
My favorite aspect of the piece is the interspersed American Apparel ads…they add a little texture to the discussion.
I’m intrigued by Marc Hedlund’s differentiation of Impressionist bloggers from Realist bloggers. My interpretation of this difference (which might not be what Marc meant by it) is that Realist blog posts are self-contained, -explanatory, and -evident entities while a post on an Impressionist blog serves to complement the whole, much like the dots making up a Seurat painting aren’t that interesting until you stand back to see the whole thing.
The downside for Impressionist blogs is that their individual posts don’t work that well outside of their intended context. If you run across a single post from an Impressionist blog in your River of News, a remixed Yahoo Pipes RSS feed, in del.icio.us, or an item in a Google search results set, it might not make a whole lot of sense. Impressionist blog posts are less likely to get Dugg or bookmarked in del.icio.us or linked around much at all. Fewer incoming links, big or small, to individual pages means fewer pageviews, which makes it more difficult to run an Impressionist blog as a business that relies on advertising revenue. If you look at most of the big blog sites, they’re all non-Impressionist blogs. All the sites whose posts are featured on the front page of Digg are non-Impressionist…those posts/articles are designed to float self-contained around the web. The blogosphere is dominated by non-Impressionist blogs and the sort of content they produce…which is sad for me because, like Marc, I value Impressionism in a weblog.
Meg and I were getting ready to go out to breakfast at some obscenely early hour on Sunday morning. I retrieved a pair of jeans from the floor.
J: Hey, there’s some change in these pants.
M: Breakfast is on you, then.
J: Yeah, if we’re going to eat, like, 68 cents-worth of breakfast.
Then I reached into the pocket to find out how much was actually in there…from some purchase I don’t recall making. 68 cents exactly. In olden times, that would have been taken as a harbinger of something, that virgins would need to be sacrificed on mountaintops to appease the gods. Meg shrugs and says, “you should post that to your blog.”
Also, Grey Dog on University has the best hash browns I’ve ever eaten.
Kevin Smith has bundled his weblog up into a book of the same title, My Boring Ass Life: The Uncomfortably Candid Diary of Kevin Smith. Smith’s an engaging writer about himself, family, and circle of friends; I’ve linked to his weblog several times in the past. His tale of actor Jason Mewes’ (he played Jay in Clerks) drug addiciton and subsequent rehab is especially fine. Available at Amazon or through Smith himself, signed.
Aw, man…Eliot is ceasing publication on slower.net, one of my favorite photoblogs. Ended on a great note though.
New web site for Hoefler & Frere-Jones, the noted and celebrated typeface designers, including a weblog. Subscribed. Oh, and the browser fonts of choice for the meticulous duo? “Lucida Grande, Lucida Sans, Verdana, Georgia, Helvetica, Arial” (thx, jonathan)
Biologists Helping Bookstores is a guerilla effort to reshelve pseudo-scientific books (books on intelligent design, for instance), taking them from the Science section and moving them to a more appropriate area of the store, like Philosophy, Religion, or Religious Fiction. (via mr)
Line items under “Skills” in my future resume: refreshing all feeds, making things unbold, tab management, pressing cmd-z, scrolling, and posting to the future.
100 blogs they love so much that they’re not going to link to a single one.
Update: Several people pointed out that the original list is available with links at PC World. Of course, it’s a pageview-pumping multiple page situation, so you’ll want the print version instead. (Yes, this is me punching a gift horse in the mouth, or whatever that expression is.)
According to a recent poll, folksonomy tops the list of annoying words spawned by the internet, followed by blogosphere, blog, netiquette, and blook. Also of note: an mp3 of a religious service is referred to as a godcast.
Digg policies from Lifehacker and Gizmodo, which state that the only Digg-worthy posts of theirs are those with “original content, new reporting, treatment, or photos” because “it’s not fair when we get the Digg for someone else’s work.” This seems inconsistent on the part of Gawker Media. One of their main innovations (if you’d like to call it that) regarding the blog format was the idea of linking to things in such a way that readers don’t need to actually leave the site to get the full (or nearly full) story. Why let all those readers (and the associated ad revenue) go to some other site to read the story…they might never return. Due in part to Gawker’s influence as first mover in the pro blog space, this practice is unfortunately standard procedure for most similar blogs.
After working on this — on again and off again, mostly off — for much too long, I’m pleased to say that a significant chunk of kottke.org now has tags (around 5,100 entries are tagged, out of ~13,000). Right now, the only way to access them is through individual tag pages, but after all the bugs are ironed out, I’ll be putting them in different places around the site (front page, main archive page, etc.).
Each tag page lists all the entries1 on the site that are tagged with that particular word…some good examples to start you off are: photography, economics, lists, infoviz, food, nyc, cities, restaurants, video, timelapse, interviews, language, maps, and fashion. Each page also has a list of tags related to that particular tag and further down in the sidebar, you’ll find lists of recently popular tags, all-time popular tags, a few favorite tags of mine, and some random tags…lots of stuff to explore.
I’ve tweaked the design as well: the main column is a little wider, the post metadata look/feel is consistent among short posts and long posts, faint dotted lines now separate all entries, and per-entry tags were added to the post metadata. I’m testing all that out for eventual site-wide use. Questions, comments, bug reports, etc. are welcome…send them on in.
Update: I almost forgot, the nsfw tag.
[1] Not all the entries exactly. Until I figure out how to do some pagination, I’ve limited the number of entries to 100 for each tag page. The movies page was more than 1 Mb when all the entries were listed. ↩
Blog to watch: Madame Royale, a blog about notable women from the past. (via cyn-c)
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