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kottke.org posts about weblogs
2005 favorites
If you’re like me, you’re waiting patiently for that day in early January when you can go more than 10 minutes without seeing a reference to some best of 2005 list. If you’re also like me, you love lists so much that you can’t get enough of them. So, with apologies to that first part of me, here’s a final 2005 lists from me: a few movies, weblogs, books, and musical selections that I enjoyed this past year (in no particular order).
Music (not necessarily released in 2005)
Ladytron, Witching Hour. This one grew on me a lot.
Kelly Clarkson, Since U Been Gone.
Fischerspooner, Odyssey.
Bloc Party, Silent Alarm.
Royksopp, The Understanding.
Diplo, Megatroid Mix. (download)
Boards of Canada, Campfire Headphase.
Mark Mothersbaugh (and others), The Life Aquatic soundtrack.
Stars, Set Yourself on Fire.
Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah.
Kanye West, Gold Digger.
Sigur Ros, Takk.
BBC Philharmonic, Beethoven’s Symphonies.
Two disappointments: Franz Ferdinand, You Could Have It So Much Better and Broken Social Scene by the band of the same name. I enjoyed Franz’s debut album and You Forgot It in People so much, but the follow-ups fell flat for me. Still trying though…
Movies (not necessarily released in 2005)
Primer.
Garden State.
Crash.
Revenge of the Sith.
Sideways.
Million Dollar Baby.
Deliverance.
Cinderella Man.
King Kong.
Didn’t see a lot of movies this year, unfortunately.
Books
Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, Haruki Murakami.
The Corrections, Jonathan Franzen.
Snow Crash, Neal Stephenson.
Consider the Lobster, David Foster Wallace.
Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, Susanna Clarke.
The Botany of Desire, Michael Pollan.
Pieces for the Left Hand, J. Robert Lennon.
Freakonomics, Steven Levitt, Stephen Dubner.
I read a ton of non-fiction but always enjoy the small amount of fiction I do read more.
Favorite weblogs. Compare with last year’s list.
Waxy. Despite a year-end Yahoo! slowdown/hangover, still one of the absolute best.
Collision Detection. Enthusiasm about technology without the irrational exuberance or Web 2.0ness of other tech/tech culture blogs.
del.icio.us inbox. Not technically a blog, but I love this ever-fresh flow of my friends’ favorites.
Robotwisdom. The original weblog was back this year after a 1.5 year hiatus. Jorn still has it.
The Morning News. Also not technically a blog, but TMN has been delivering high quality content on a daily basis for a long time now.
Flickr friends. Still the most fun on the web.
Cynical-C. Can’t remember where or when I found this one, but almost every single thing on there is something I’m interested in.
Scripting News. I skim most of his opinion stuff, disagree with 90% of the rest of what I do read, but Dave has his finger on the pulse of the part of the web I care most about. He gets links so quickly sometimes that I think he’s actually part RSS aggregator. “He’s more machine than man now.” “No, there is still good in him…”
Boing Boing. There’s stuff I don’t care about here, but the best of BB is really good.
3 Quarks Daily. The most accessible smart weblog out there.
Marginal Revolution. Quirky economics. Interesting everyday.
Goldenfiddle. I dislike celebrity gossip, but gf makes it seem interesting somehow. Damn you!
Youngna. Rationally exuberant.
You may notice that there are few “pro” blogs on this list. The best stuff out there is still being generated by interested, enthusiastic amateurs. When you’re producing media for a profit, there’s a certain vitality that’s lost, I think…a loss I’ve been struggling with on kottke.org for the past few months. kottke.org was on last year’s list but doesn’t appear this year…here’s hoping for a better year for the site in 2006.
Cory is leaving the EFF (at least
Cory is leaving the EFF (at least on a full-time basis; he’ll still be an EFF Fellow) to be a full-time writer (Boing Boing, novels, short stories, etc.). Good luck!
Chris Anderson has one of the best
Chris Anderson has one of the best descriptions I’ve read of collective knowledge systems like Google, Wikipedia, and blogs: they’re probabilistic systems “which sacrifice perfection at the microscale for optimization at the macroscale”.
Blog search still sucks (a little)
Update: I fucked up on this post and you should reread it if you’ve read it before. After reading this post by Niall Kennedy, I checked and found that I have mentioned or linked to the site for Freakonomics 5 times (1 2 3 4 5), not 13. The other 8 times, I either linked to a post on the Freakonomics blog that was unrelated to the book, had the entry tagged with “freakonomics” (tags are not yet exposed on my site and can’t be crawled by search engines), or I used the word “Freakonomists”, not “Freakonomics”. Bottom line: the NY Times listing is still incorrect, Google and Yahoo picked up all the posts where I actually mentioned “Freakonomics” in the text of the post but missed the 2 links to freakonomics.com, Google Blog Search got 2/3 (& missed the 2 links), Technorati got 1/3 (& missed the 2 links), and IceRocket, Yahoo Blog Search, BlogPulse, & Bloglines whiffed entirely. Steven Levitt would be very disappointed in my statistical fact-checking skills right now. :(
I wish Niall had emailed me about this instead of posting it on his site, but I guess that’s how weblogs work, airing dirty laundry instead of trying to get it clean. Fair enough…I’ve publicly complained about the company he works for (Technorati) instead of emailing someone at the company about my concerns, so maybe he had a right to hit back. Perhaps a little juvenile on both our parts, I’d say. (Oh, and I turned off the MT search thing that Niall used to check my work. I’m not upset he used it, but I’m irritated that it seems to be on by default in MT…I never intended for that search interface to be public.)
———
The NY Times recently released their list of the most blogged about books of 2005. Their methodology in compiling the list:
This list links to a selection of Web posts that discuss some of the books most frequently mentioned by bloggers in 2005. The books were selected by conducting an automated survey of 5,000 of the most-trafficked blogs.
Unsurprisingly, the top spot on the list went to Freakonomics. I remembered mentioning the book several times on my site (including this interview with author Steven Levitt around the release of the book), so I checked out the citations they had listed for it. According to the Times, Freakonomics was cited by 125 blogs, but not once by kottke.org, a site that by any measure is one of the most-visited blogs out there.[1] A quick search in my installation of Movable Type yielded 13 5 mentions of the book on kottke.org in the last 9 months. I had also mentioned Blink, Harry Potter, Getting Things Done, Collapse, The Wisdom of Crowds, The Singularity is Near, and State of Fear, all of which appear in the top 20 of the Times’ list and none of which are cited by the Times as having been mentioned on kottke.org in 2005.
I chalked this up to a simple error of omission, but then I started checking around some more. Google’s main index returned only three distinct mentions of Freakonomics on kottke.org. Google Blog Search returned two results. Yahoo: 3 results (0 results on Yahoo’s blog search). Technorati only found one result (I’m not surprised). Many of the blog search services don’t even let you search by site, so IceRocket, BlogPulse, and Bloglines were of no help. (See above for corrections.) I don’t know where the Times got their book statistics from, but it was probably from one of these sites (or a similar service).
Granted this is just one weblog[2], which I only checked into because I’m the author, but it’s not like kottke.org is hard to find or crawl. The markup is pretty good [3], fairly semantic, and hasn’t changed too much for the past two years. The subject in question is not off-topic…I post about books all the time. And it’s one of the more visible weblogs out there…lots of links in to the front page and specific posts and a Google PR of 8. So, my point here is not “how dare the Times ignore my popular and important site!!!” but is that the continuing overall suckiness of searching blogs is kind of amazing and embarrassing given the seemingly monumental resources being applied to the task. It’s forgivable that the Times would not have it exactly right (especially if they’re doing the crawling themselves), but when companies like Technorati and Google are setting themselves up as authorities on how large the blogosphere is, what books and movies people are reading/watching, and what the hot topics online are but can’t properly catalogue the most obvious information out there, you’ve got to wonder a) how good their data really is, and b) if what they are telling us is actually true.
[1] Full disclosure: I am the author of kottke.org.
[2] This is an important point…these observations are obviously a starting point for more research about this. But this one hole is pretty gaping and fits well with what I’ve observed over the past several months trying to find information on blogs using search engines.
[3] I say only pretty good because it’s not validating right now because of entity and illegal character errors, which I obviously need to wrestle with MT to correct at some point. But the underlying markup is solid.
How Seed magazine’s web site was built
How Seed magazine’s web site was built using Movable Type. It’s not just for blogs anymore. (via airbag)
Stephanie Hendrick has tracked down the identity
Stephanie Hendrick has tracked down the identity of an anonymous blogger (she matched them to a non-anonymous blog) using linguistic identity markers. See also secret sites. (via j/t)
Under the digital mattress
One of the most interesting things to come out of the secret sites discussion is that people are keeping their private journals on the web instead of in a paper journal under their mattress or in a Word document on their computer. This sounds surprising, but there’s a couple of good reasons for it:
- The tools for writing, organizing, and searching an online journal written with Typepad or LiveJournal are superior to those for writing a paper journal or an electronic diary (in Word or text format) stored locally. Hyperlinks, entries organized by date, mood, category, if you’re used to using these things writing a public site, you might have trouble going back to just text in a Word document for your important innermost thoughts.
- Your diary may actually be more private and secure on the web. A password protected online journal is more difficult for a parent, significant other, or parole officer to stumble upon and read than a document sitting on a hard drive of a shared computer or hidden on the top shelf of a closet, especially if you’re careful with your cookies, browser history, choose a good password, and are more computer savvy than said parent/S.O./P.O.
I bet few would have predicted keeping personal diaries secret as a use of the public internet several years ago.
The Carpetbagger is a NY Times weblog
The Carpetbagger is a NY Times weblog written by David Carr that covers awards season in Hollywood.
Secret sites
The decompression from my trip to Asia continues. I have read through ~8000 items in my newsreader and discarded almost all of them (despite much interest in solving the problem, no one has built a machine that has any idea about what content needles I want out of the media haystack).
However, one item caught my interest (although I can’t remember where I saw it): someone asked their readers how many secret sites/blogs they maintained. That is, sites that no one knows you’re the author of (written anonymously or with a nom de plume) or sites to which the general public does not have access. If I remember correctly, a large number of the respondents not only maintained a secret site, but had several. I have one secret blog, published under my own name, that only a small group of friends can read. I just started it recently (after learning that several friends have been doing this for awhile) and don’t update it very often. How about you…any secret sites? Why keep them on the down-low?
43 songs about the blogosphere (full-size). There’s “Checking
43 songs about the blogosphere (full-size). There’s “Checking My Stats On An Hourly Basis”, “I’M THIRTEEN AND EVERYTHING SUCKS”, “You’ve Never Heard Of This Band I Love”, and sentimental favorite “Don’t Read Kottke (But I Steal His Links)”.
Six Apart’s response to several weeks of
Six Apart’s response to several weeks of server slugishness was fantastic…they asked each customer how they wanted to be compensated based on how much the server downtime affected them and their site. You don’t see the honor system much in business these days.
What would Gawker look like if it
What would Gawker look like if it got bought by the NY Times? (via waxy and panop)
Paul Ford has some fun at Business 2.0
Paul Ford has some fun at Business 2.0’s expense and invents Blogverthacking[TM] in the process.
Support the EFF and the rights of
Support the EFF and the rights of bloggers by putting a badge on your site. Here’s a list of things that the EFF is fighting for on behalf of bloggers.
My pal Hossein gets turned back at
My pal Hossein gets turned back at the US border after the guard Googled him, discovered his blog, and determined that his presence in the US has been a little more permanent than it should be.
Mirroring the progression of diaries and graphic
Mirroring the progression of diaries and graphic design, scrapbooking, the practice of arranging and decorating photos in albums, has gone digital. Personal desktop publishing anyone?
Pancakes in the dew
For our first lunch in Saigon, we met up with Graham from Noodlepie, a Saigon-centric food blog. We cabbed it from our hotel to Quan Co Tam - Banh Canh Trang Bang to have one of his favorite Vietnamese dishes, banh trang phoi suong (literally “rice pancake exposed in the dew (at night)”). Here’s the outlay:
It’s a simple dish; just boiled pork wrapped in thin rice paper with an assortment of herbs, pickled onions & carrots, cucumber, and raw bean sprouts. As you can see from the photo (or the much better photos that Graham took on a previous trip), the plate of herbs that they give you is quite impressive and varied; one smelled like lemon, another like fish. All wrapped up and dipped in fish sauce, it’s delicious and simple.
Afterwards we headed to the market, Graham for dinner fixings and us for some browsing around. Before we parted, he treated us to a sugarcane & lemon drink (mia da) and a pennywort smoothie (not as bad as I’d thought for something that tasted like salad through a straw). Thanks for the nice lunch, Graham!
Reasons bloggers hate the mainstream media. “Bloggers
Reasons bloggers hate the mainstream media. “Bloggers got stood up at prom. By the MSM.”
Dooce puts ads on her site to
Dooce puts ads on her site to feed her family (she’s supporting them *entirely* by writing her personal web site) and gets an earful of complaint in return. Thought this was particularly insightful about why no subscription fees or donations instead: “By using ads I’m making my livelihood my problem and no one else’s.” I’m not sure if that’s strictly true, but it resonated a lot with me.
In the WSJ, Jason Fry writes about
In the WSJ, Jason Fry writes about his experiences in starting a weblog about the Mets. If you’re a new blogger, this is a good look at how your first few months might go. “The downside of being a blog writer? Being a blog administrator.”
We have a new leader in the
We have a new leader in the dumbest blog-related word/phrase competition: blogometric pressure.
things magazine has a nice little post
things magazine has a nice little post on the Internet as reliquary. Reminds me of Julian Dibbell’s comparison of weblogs to wunderkammers.
Casual content creation
Over on the Odeo blog, Ev talks about a potentially different type of podcasting, casual content creation:
But, personally, I’m much more of a casual content creator, especially in this realm. The other night, I sent a two-minute podcast to my girlfriend, who was out of town, and got a seven-second “podcast” back that I now keep on my iPod just because it makes me smile. I sent an “audio memo” to my team a while back for something that was much easier to say than type, and I think they actually listened.
A blogging analogue would be Instapundit or Boing Boing (published, broadcast) versus a private LiveJournal[1] (shared, narrowcast). It’s like making a phone call without the expectation of synchronous communication…it’s all voicemail. I thought about doing this the other day when I needed to respond to an email with a lengthy reply. In that particular instance, I ended up sending an email instead because it was the type of thing that might have been forwarded to someone else for comment and returned, etc. But I can see myself using audio like this in the future.
[1] Integrated podcasting tools within LiveJournal would be huge, methinks.
Tumblelogs
On my web travels the other day, I came across a new (to me) kind of weblog, the tumblelog. Here are a few examples to get the gist of what a tumblelog is: hit projectionist first and then Anarchaia (which seems to have been the first one), Church Burning tumblelog, Mikael’s Tumblelog, and ones zeros majors and minors.
A tumblelog is a quick and dirty stream of consciousness, a bit like a remaindered links style linklog but with more than just links. They remind me of an older style of blogging, back when people did sites by hand, before Movable Type made post titles all but mandatory, blog entries turned into short magazine articles, and posts belonged to a conversation distributed throughout the entire blogosphere. Robot Wisdom and Bifurcated Rivets are two older style weblogs that feel very much like these tumblelogs with minimal commentary, little cross-blog chatter, the barest whiff of a finished published work, almost pure editing…really just a way to quickly publish the “stuff” that you run across every day on the web.
Many of the tumblelogs I ran across seem to be powered by Ruby on Rails, itself a quick and dirty programming framework that emphasizes fast prototyping. You can kind of see how tumblelogging is the blog equivalent of Rails. Christian Neukirchen describes how he edits his tumblelog using a templating language called Vooly.
I like the idea of tumblelogging a lot; I’ve been slowly moving kottke.org in a similar direction for awhile. Different ways of displaying various types of content…remaindered links, regular posts, book reviews, and movie reviews are all displayed differently. I’m working on incorporating photo albums and perhaps a daily photolog…as well as a couple other different types of content. I’ve been focusing a lot more on the remaindered links (because they’re more fun and closer to pure editing, which I enjoy a lot more than writing) and less on the magazine-like regular posts-with-titles. The further away from punditry I can get, the better it will be for all of us.
Jakob Nielsen’s latest Alertbox is about weblog
Jakob Nielsen’s latest Alertbox is about weblog usability. I actually think most of these are pretty good, but as with all such guidelines, they are made to be broken.
Turning the Tables
Steven Shaw doesn’t like a lot of food criticism and he’s not shy about telling you why. In his opinionated new book (which, as a NYC food fan, I enjoyed thoroughly), Shaw devotes much of a lengthy chapter to skewering guidebooks like Zagat’s and Michelin, starred restaurant reviews, and the undercover restaurant reviewer. Ruth Reichl, now editor-in-chief of Gourmet, recently recounted her experiences as food critic for the New York Times in her newest book, Garlic and Sapphires. Reichl employed a number of disguises when going to restaurants in order to ensure she didn’t receive special service because of her job at the Times. Shaw believes this approach is flawed and serves to distance restaurants and their customers:
It sends a signal to the public that restaurants are out to deceive us, and that in order to expose them restaurant reviewers must act as undercover investigative consumer advocates.
He prefers an approach akin to other forms of artistic criticism, with the reviewer taking a more active role in being as close to the action as possible:
There is, to my mind, absolutely nothing wrong with a critic having ties — close ties — to the community about which he writes. In my opinion, it is preferable from the standpoint of providing the best possible coverage. To me, the primary function of restaurant criticism should not be something so prosaic as reporting on the average meal and labeling it with some stars. Rather, restaurant criticism should parallel other forms of criticism — in art, literature, architecture, music — such that critics are champions of excellence who promote the best within the industry while exposing the worst.
This probably sounds like a familar argument to many who follow weblogs and the ongoing conversation about the responsibility of bloggers regarding disclosure of junkets, gifts, free movies, & review copies of books, their relationship to advertisers, who their friends are, and so forth. It’s a question of access vs. independence and objectivity. To get a story, some sort of access is often required, but then the reader might worry about biased reportage.
The key is trust (and I’m sure Shaw would agree with me here). Do you trust a particular source of information to balance her need for access to the story with the desire of her readers for her to remain as independent and fair-minded as possible? I believe that if we want better reviews, we need to be better readers and take a more active role in how we deal with information. Access isn’t necessarily bad, but what individual bloggers/journalists do with that access can be.
And when reading, you should be asking yourself, is the writer being fair here? Have they been fair in the past? If the piece you’re reading appears in the NY Times or the WSJ, how does the political orientation (if any) affect what gets printed in the paper? Are music journalists and bloggers biased in their reviews because they receive free review CDs in the mail? And if so, does that make the reviews completely worthless? If they don’t disclose things like junkets, personal relationships to their subjects, and the like, does that completely negate the review? Or can you adjust your opinion of the reviews to get something worthwhile out of them anyway?
Dealing with information has always been an imprecise science; there’s no such thing as complete objectivity. But as readers, we can encourage the writers whose work we read to be as fair as possible.
Disclosure: I purchased this book in a NYC bookstore with my own money. I have never met Steven Shaw, but I do enjoy eGullet very much. If you click on any of the links to Amazon in this piece and purchase merchandise there, I will get a small percentage (~5%) of the sale.
This comment from Nick Denton (and much
This comment from Nick Denton (and much of the rest of the thread) demonstrates why Gawker is still worth reading on occasion. It’s disappointing Nick isn’t more involved in the day-to-day of the Gawker sites…his writing is always more entertaining than his blog empire.
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