Friday, January 30, 2009

Blog Info Required

Right, stop sitting around like a bunch of bankers, I want you all to do some work. Tell me which you think are the best blogs in the world. We can take it as read that this one will be at the top of your list and your own second, so, like Shakespeare and the Bible on Desert Island Discs, you can have those. Please aim upmarket - I know about the skateboarding squirrels and stuff. Also anything about blog philosophy/psychology etc would be helpful. Spend all day doing this and most of the weekend. The fee will be my gratitude and high regard.

39 comments:

  1. This comment has been removed by the author.

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  2. Well, Think of England is obviously the best blog in the world, but if you're writing some of your famous 'reportage' about blogging or something, then you absolutely must mention US internet legend James Lileks and his 'Bleat'.

    He's actually only switched Bleat to the standard blog format with comments this year, but he's a force of nature: effortlessly funny, writes beautifully, wholly original and almost insanely prolific.

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  3. Right, I'm taking this thread over.

    And if you're talking blog psychology/philosophy, then you have to distinguish between male and female blogs.

    Broadly, female blogs are for making friends and saying how nice everything is and talking about all the things you like and making it look like your life is idyllic; and male blogs are for arguing.

    And here you really ought to mention Godwin's Law and this cartoon.

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  4. First thoughts would be that Jeff, England's premier pox doctors clerk has one that gives a wonderfull insight into plummeted depths, lots of material for piekiatrists and the like.
    Add to that the fact that it has become a magnet for all that is good and wholesome within the world of literature.
    Come to think of it, if there was a Nobel for blogging...can you imagine his acceptance speech, move over Kate.

    More later.

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  5. You have to mention the best science blogs on the planet.

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  6. If you want really high brow then some of the best mathematicians on the planet discuss problems openly on blogs with ideas pinging backwards and forwards.

    Terence Tao (Fields medalist - the "nobel prize for maths"): http://terrytao.wordpress.com/

    Tim Gowers (also Fields medalist):http://gowers.wordpress.com/

    See also Michael Nielsen's blog post where I got these from for other similar links: http://michaelnielsen.org/blog/?p=545

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  7. So you want us to divvy up the contents of our 'Bookmarks' do you? I'm afraid that would give you far too clear a picture of me and all my foibles. Next thing you know Jacqui Smith will be asking you to hand it over to her.

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  8. i think the main thing about blogs is the comments feature; though even blogs with comments disabled still differ from other forms of writing.

    Also, something to do with having a website address often induces in the reader a sense of going into someone's property - some are welcome guests, some not. If you buy a newspaper in which so and so has a column, well, you bought a newspaper with many articles, and his or hers is just one. If you buy so & so's book even, you OWN it, it's a physical thing - you can burn it or eat it or annotate it as you please.

    But if you click on a bookmark or link, or type the url in, in a sense you are ENTERING the blogger's territory. Our minds still like physical analogies - all this virtual reality jazz is still very new - so when i read a blog i do feel like i'm entering someone's property. With Thought Experiments its akin to a large & well-maintained, reputable house, albeit with some odd rooms. i suspect that in part trolls react against this sense of being on someone else's land, they want to smash things up.

    The analogy only holds so far but for myself i definitely feel i am visiting someone else's property when i read their blog. And i feel my own blog is 'my space' (ugh) in virtual reality, that i own it in a way i couldn't own a book i'd written - someone could buy the book and do what they want with it. Being unpublished does have its advantages...a certain noli me tangere quality, immaculate & separate from the world, because not QUITE physically in it - at least not in the sense that you can touch a blog, or indeed do anything but look at it, and listen if it has music. But you can't buy it, you can't own it. Hence the freedom of blogging; and hence perhaps the venom of trolls who can't stand for anyone to be free.

    Sorry, long comment: bored at work.

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  9. Hmmn, in broadband Britain I spend a lot of time with "waiting for www.my-favourite-blog.com" - subtle, memorably evocative and beguilingly minimalist.

    I suppose it's rather a trick question in a way. The best blogs on the net, imho, are the meta-blogs run by the NY Times, the Guardian and the Times - the pages where the individual blogs of their writers are collated (or of other writers in the case of Comment Central). Almost impossible for a single blogger to beat that. I don't go for the big, famous blogs like Huffington Post. Too slick and commercial. A good blog needs to be rougher and more provisional, like life.

    I like Nicholas Carr's Rough Type which has had quite a lot about "blog philosophy/psychology" lately. Also, Nick Cohen and Marc Andreessen (but currently resting). Among many others, one that probably only appeals to a few is www.thinkbuddha.org but I like it, and for photographs of the China we usually don't see there is Oie de Chine.

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  10. I think of the blogosphere as a vast collection of pubs.

    The vastness is key: if you somehow had all the pubs of Britain within walking distance, you would still end up going regularly to a few favourites.

    Obviously some are bigger, flashier, more popular pubs, with karaoke and big screen football, but some of the best ones are small, obscure, characterful locals.

    Commenters are the gobby regulars (though for every commenter there are ten silent voyeurs).

    The best most bloggers can hope for is an interesting collection of regulars.

    This can make the blogoshpere a crushing disappointment for talented people who want to use a blog to promote their novel/comedy/poetry/political punditry.

    Which brings us back to the vastness: where everyone has a voice and a shot at the bigtime, nobody does.

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  11. I like http://bldgblog.blogspot.com/
    It's about architecture and art, but also manages to be so much more too. I can lose myself there for hours.

    I also like McCabism which I found through your blog. That is often mind-blowing (and very funny) too.

    And then there are all the science blogs at Nature Network (mentioned by rpg above) - so many that the days could easily become weeks.

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  12. Apropos >mindblowing and very funny< ...Here Is The Story Of How Gordon McCabe Shot Himself In The Foot!

    THE STING

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  13. I rather like Terry Teachout's blog, http://www.artsjournal.com/aboutlastnight/, which give a tremendous insight into the working life of an arts critic (though I find that his frequent references to his wife as 'Mrs T', tend to conjure up the entirely inappropriate image of him as an aggressive African-American man with a mohican haircut and lots of gold jewellery!)

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  14. Tyler Cowen's Marginal Revolution, ostensibly an economics blog, offers a good mix of the politics and culture.

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  15. james wolcott's blog at vanity fair is fantastic. he's masterful at blending the high with the low; excoriating last night's episode of The L Word, while managing to visit the ballet every other night. a very welcoming online commmunity, much like this blog.

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  16. Overcoming Bias is one of the best blogs I have read with very interesting and intelligent discussion. http://www.overcomingbias.com/

    Excerpt from Welcome Message:
    "How can we obtain beliefs closer to reality?

    Over the last several decades, new research has changed science's picture of how we succeed or fail to seek the truth. The heuristics and biases program, in cognitive psychology, has exposed dozens of major flaws in human reasoning. Microeconomics, through the power of statistics, has shown that many facets of society don't work the way we thought.

    Overcoming Bias aims to bring the implications home. We want to avoid, or at least minimize, the startling systematic mistakes that science is discovering. If we know the common patterns of error or self-deception, maybe we can work around them ourselves, or build social structures for smarter groups. We know we aren't perfect, and can't be perfect, but trying is better than not trying.

    We blog life through the lens of the cognitive sciences: Cognitive psychology, evolutionary psychology, microeconomics, applied statistics, social psychology, probability and decision theory, even a bit of Artificial Intelligence now and then."

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  17. One thing i like about blogs: as long as you make your daily experiences & thoughts the subject, a blog can incorporate just about anything. If, of course, you set out to write about books only, or film reviews, it is a limited venture. But as long as your world is the main thing, the form is incredibly flexible. i've found it can adjust to take in the weirdest and most unexpected thoughts & happenings. i think if i had to describe my blog to someone, to say 'what kind of things' i write about, it would seem impossibly various and bizarre, but somehow it all hangs together. i can't think of any other literary form which can do that.

    For my own blog, i've felt that the key is to exclude nothing that interests me - i don't care if my readers like it or not, i assume that they are likely reading because the general tone of my world interests them (for whatever weird reason), not just my posts on books or my saucy pictures or what have you. i only exclude the things which i feel sure people wouldn't believe.

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  18. Anecdotal Evidence - wise, literate, and quietly and modestly uncompromising

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  19. Philosophy blogs:

    Mark Vernon's Philosophy and Life Blog

    Bill Vallicella's Maverick Philosopher

    Psychologist Seth Roberts:

    Seth's blog: Self-Experimentation, Scientific Method, the Shangri-La Diet, etc.

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  20. Should have given references to a couple of things I mentioned yesterday:

    Marc Andreessen (he invented the web browser)
    Nicholas Carr - Rough Type
    Will Buckingham - thinkbhudda.org (with a couple of recent articles on blog philosophy/psychology).

    For questions of freedom and the internet, forgot to mention Lawrence Lessig's blog. It's far from a given that governments won't mess it all up.

    Also a couple more:

    Arts and Letters Daily
    New Yorker Blogs

    I know that neither of these is a blog in the classic single-person sense. They are collections of links or blogs. But if the future means that news is best left to organizations other than newspapers, then these meta-pages and others like them from the Times, NYT, Guardian, etc., are the future and it's already here.

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  21. What Brit said about James Lileks and The Bleat.

    Volokh is a legal blog, with some very high-level contributors.

    This thread about developing an online comment culture is probably appropriate here.

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  22. I've been banker bashing with Nassim and Nouriel so, fortunately for everyone, I don't have time to upload all my thoughts on blogs, good and bad.

    I must object though to Mark's claim that Marc Andreessen invented the web browser. Andreessen popularised the web browser - doing Mosaic at college, then making sure Netscape ran pretty well on Windows - and made a few billion, with help from Jim Clark. Good bit of entrepreneurship, can't say anything against it. But Tim Berners-Lee invented the web browser, just as he invented HTML, http and the URL. Tim didn't make diddly squat. As I pointed out on Robert Peston's blog, that little bit of history is enough to show that commercial life is never going to be fair. One thing you could have learned on a blog last October that could still come in handy, you never know.

    Peston's blog was very cool around September time but soon got too popular and the very good City types mostly went off to more interesting pastures - at least that's the way I read it. And that illustrates the problem we all have here, given that 'hard taskmaster' would be a kind way to describe Mr Appleyard at this juncture.

    A great blog post yesterday on Anthropogenic Global Warming ended: "Ultimately the only solution may be to cauterize the proliferating mass of corruption. That can only be done by the new media, which are not playing footsies with political frauds. All we can do is keep telling the truth, and listen to honest debate. Keep on doing that, and this sickness may yet pass, without killing the patient."

    That says well why blogs may be extremely important. You don't have to agree with the guy's points about AGW - although I do, which helps. I've found the quality of article and responses on Pajamas Media one pointer to the future. It's not the only place I like in the blogosphere. I agree with Mark and others that Nick Carr is well ahead of the game on interpreting this new world to itself. And there are about a thousand others.

    However, it would wrong not to mention the dark side, because there is one. If you don't believe me try We Live in Public (and the end of empathy) by Jason Calacanis, also from this week. It covers most of the bases.

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  23. Lawyers, Guns, & Money - just in general

    slacktivist - a non-authoritarian Christian, he's been providing a withering review of the Left Behind books and the misguided theology they represent. He went painstakingly through the first volume in the series, and is now taking a break by working through the Left Behind movie scene by scene. He also has interesting things to say about the American newspaper business, as he works at one.

    The Yorkish Ranter, yorksranter.wordpress.com, for the fascinating coverage of Viktor Bout, and shady airline movements in general.

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  24. You are Appleyard our most distinguished electronic intellectual and I endorse the praise. Also most of the above and:

    the frontal cortex
    stumbling and mumbling
    the fly bottle
    john redwood
    boing boing (it is a blog really)
    d listed (a base taste for brilliantly written mean and meaningless gossip about people youve never heard of)
    Cranmer
    Heresy Corner
    A Dons Life (loveable and infuriating by turns)

    Conspicuously absent is a really engaged first rate UK Legal blog; and pace Chris Dillow the left has lost the plot most leftist blogs are compromised, deluded or just spitting venom - a real pity.

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  25. Struck how on Friday Harold Evans wrote on the BBC website suggesting re-introduction of the word bankster. A long article with some genuinely useful stuff about JP Morgan's buying of politicians in the 20s and 30s. But hang on, I'd been noticing the word on blogs for a while now. A quick google throws up ex-Silicon Valley gossip-blogger Nick Denton suggesting the same return to 30s idiom in October. There are earlier examples suggesting a bandwagon Denton himself may have been trying to jump-steer. The question arises: do blogs and related new media drive much mainstream English language development now?

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  26. nihoncassandra.blogspot.com : Cassandra does Tokyo, financial opinions from Japan

    And of course, calculatedrisk (calculatedriskblog.com).

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  27. I realise it's past the deadline but a couple of further thoughts.

    First, on the history. Although in July 2007 the Wall Street Journal like other old media outfits was ready to celebrate the ten year anniversary of blogging, with Jorn Barger in the spotlight as the first blogger, this prompted an excellent riposte from Joe Hewitt, occasional blogger but hoary web veteran, developer of Firefox, now busy programming the iPhone app for Facebook. I agree with Joe that blogging had no one point of origin. Unlike wiki, which was invented (and programmed in a mere 200 lines of Perl) by one man in 1995, Ward Cunningham, gentle genius. Outrageously Jimmy Wales, who first heard of the wiki idea over five years later, via Larry Sanger, via Ben Kovitz, refused to credit Ward once on being interviewed for half an hour on Wikipedia by Clive Anderson on Radio 4 a couple of years back, even on being asked what the wiki name means. That was also Ward's idea - he wanted it quick, both conceptually and response-wise, like those fine airport buses or taxis on arrival in Hawaii. (It's wiki wiki if you want to go really fast in a taxi, the way Ward explained it once at his home in Oregon.) This aspect of wikiness as "don't have to think about it fast" is also key - perhaps even more key - to the experience bloggers have enjoyed from the earliest days.

    On a more practical level, two recent airliner scares led to a demonstration of how blog-like commenting can add much, even to a prestigious media brand. In the first Gulliver of The Economist was helped out significantly by one or more real pilots. In the second an old U.S. Navy man explains quite how miraculous - or skillful, take your pick - it was for large ferries and other craft to pick up without mishap every single passenger from that U.S. Airways jet that ditched in the Hudson river just before another old Navy pilot said farewell to the nation.

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  28. "Strange Herring's purpose is to entertain and to terrify. And to confound. To entertain, to terrify, and to confound. And to discomfit. So, to entertain, to terrify, to confound, and to discomfit." "The blog’s name comes from a 16th-century tract entitled A Most Strange and Wonderful Herring Taken Neere Drenton by Jan van Doetecum. It seems that freak members of the family Clupidae were interpreted as portents of the End of All Things. (For more on this, see Diarmaid MacCulloch’s magisterial The Reformation.)"

    "One [other] of Strange Herring’s purposes for being, alongside keeping its administrator off the streets and out of trouble, is to enable you to read the signs of the times."

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