One Nation Under Blogs

[Cheech Tremendous 0]

Blogs have essentially taken over the internet world, managing to both gain in popularity and draw the ire of every newspaper employee across the country in recent years. They basically run the gamut from can't miss to unreadable drivel, with 95% of them falling somewhere in between.

 

What blogs do you read?

[Mik 0]

From the Gawker network (or used to be): Gawker, Consumerist, Deadspin, Idolator, Gizmodo

 

Also read a few finance blogs: iwillteachyoutoberich and Get Rich Slowly (where our very own Stephen Popick contributes in some way).

 

Also read stereogum, Engadget, tuaw (Apple weblog), The Superficial, Perez Hilton and a bunch of MMA blogs mostly every day.

 

[Xavier Cromartie 0]

I currently have 36 subscriptions in my Google Reader, although a lot of them are rarely updated or are not worth checking every day.

 

Talking Points Memo (political news) and FiveThirtyEight (political analysis) are the two frequently updated ones on which I have a 100% read rate.

 

NewScientist and Discovery Channel have the most starred items.

 

Somali Musings has, by far, the highest ratio of blog entries to starred items. I star almost every post.

[Cheech Tremendous 0]

Is FiveThirtyEight the site run by Nate Silver? I still can't get over the fact that he's doing political analysis now.

[Guest]

Obligatory Deadspin mention to start things off.

 

Bad Left Hook starts my blog reading day off. It's hard to find a good boxing blog, as so many of them are more focused on the news than they are actual opinions. The Boxing Bulletin is a newer one which looks to be taking off well. I like that one better, but I read both all the same.

 

Fire Ned Colletti Now brings the hilarity. Lastly, I recommend The Offside to ANY soccer fan out there. Very informative.

 

That's it.

[Guest Vitamin X]

More frequently checked/read blogs:

 

Deadspin, as probably most of the TSM Sports Folder regulars are. After that I usually then go to Blogtown Mercury (Portland Mercury's blog), Bikeportland.org, Wise Bread, The idiot bullshit picture fun time trilogy (encompassing ICanHazCheeseburger, FAIL Blog, and GraphJam), and then I just check the other ones whenever they're updated, like ikea hacker, a few more Portland-oriented sites, The Art of Manliness (really good blog btw), HackCollege, and PostSecret.

 

Anthony Bourdain has a really interesting blog too as any one of his fans would imagine. I have some blogs that just update way too frequently for my taste but I'm still subscribed to them. Gizmodo is the best example, they put out 45.1 items per day according to my GReader stats, almost twice as many as my next closest one, TreeHugger. Neatorama, Bargainist, Consumerist, Crooks and Liars, and Lifehacker round out the category of "update way too frequently for me to read everything, but once I finish through all my other blogs, I'll start reading through those".

 

Speaking of which, I like having my items presented from oldest posts to newest because I like to see causal relationships with blog posts (e.g., I don't want to read a follow-up to a story before the story itself) so those blogs that update way too much and have hundreds of unread items go from newest to oldest, as I won't even bother going that far down the list.

 

Basically, I think having a really boring IT job is what helps the most with both reading an assload of blogs and TSM. If I were to get a different job that wasn't so computer-oriented, that would probably kill a lot of the time I spend doing both of those.

[Big Ol' Smitty 0]

Lawyers, Guns, & Money

Matthew Yglesias

Attackerman

Danger Room (WIRED)

Defense Tech

Foreign Policy Passport (sometimes mosey over to the other FP blogs, too)

Hatewatch (Southern Poverty Law Center)

Spy Talk

The Progressive Realist

Obsidian Wings

[PUT THAT DICK IN MY MOUTH! 0]

Nobody's posted about music blogs yet, so here are a few cool ones:

 

http://mutant-sounds.blogspot.com/ - Provides .rars of super-rare, mostly foreign, mostly avant-garde records. An absolutely invaluable resource. Updated once a week or so.

 

http://ghettobassquake.blogspot.com/ - Pretty good site if you want to keep up with what's popping in club scenes in Africa and Latin America. I doubt it'll find much of an audience here, but maybe...

 

http://www.thefader.com/ - Probably the best clearinghouse for "hipster music" on the net. Toms of free mp3s and DJ mixes and mixtapes posted every day.

 

http://brandonsoderberg.blogspot.com/ - One of the few blogs I've seen that engages in, like, real long form rap criticism. I don't actually agree with half of what this dude writes, but it's still usually pretty interesting. Right now he's doing a month-long "appreciation" of J. Dilla's Donuts which is starting to get a little tedious, and so I'd advise against judging the blog solely by the last 10+ posts. There's some good stuff in the archives.

 

http://www.riffmarket.com/ - Former pitchfork writer and noted Village Voice fabulist Nick Sylvester's rarely-updated blog. He only posts like once every three months, but when he does it's usually some of the most thought-provoking music writing on the web. He's one of the few dudes out there who's really 'thinking critically' about our current musical moment. The two latest posts (one of which is about Animal Collective and Hipster Runoff, the other of which is about Girl Talk) are both pretty phenomenal and well worth your time.

[Smartly Pretty 0]

Dude, that hipster runoff thing was an awesome read. Nice link.

 

I read the SNY network of blogs pretty regularly. MetsBlog is fantastic, Matthew Cerrone is a great guy, always has useful information and some pretty good insight. On the other hand, sister blog TheKnicksBlog is really really bad, but I don't know where else to read so I usually read that. The head blogger is this guy, Tommy Dee. About once a week or so he has a blog post about how he's a legitimate credible journalist and should not be taken lightly because he's a "just a blogger." That's fine, I like that he has pride in what I assume is his job (this is an SNY sponsored blog after all). But he's the most unprofessional journalist of all time, and generally has no information. He curses in every blog post he makes. That's fine, I curse all the time, but I curse when I'm talking to my friends or whatever. So the other day when he said that a foul call on David Lee was "horseshit" I sent him an e-mail saying that if he wants his blog to be treated as a credible journalistic source, he has to write it like on. He told me to fuck myself.