For Blogday. I enjoy the blogs of people who practice a craft and write about it; for example Spirits Dancing is the blog of an artist in Australia. “My husband’s grandfather had a wide notion of what might be fixed with paint, and it got more extensive as he got older, until he was happily fixing stains in upholstery and carpets with dabs of paint.”
Two blogs that skim off the cream from the long tail. Global Voices out of harvard is providing a slight glimpse of what the real world is like; it tends to be a bit more political than I’d like “In Bangladesh, Futurebanglanetwork is cynical about the World Bank’s motivations when it comes to lobbying against a SIM card tax.” For something completely different Xupacabras is almost entirely arty photographs of nude women and certainly not safe for work; it provides an excellent portal for finding the sites of amazing photographers.
The author of Open Brackets is a translator who grew up Canada and lives in france. I particularly love how many times she will revise any given posting. “Although most of us would probably like to think that grand philosophical leitmotifs thread their way through our lives (ethical dilemmas and a steady but glorious plod to some form of wisdom), an obscenely large portion of solitary meditation is in fact taken up by the pettiest of thoughts ”
And finally pubsub. Pubsub isn’t a blog, it’s kind of search engine You give it a query and it gives you back a rss feed. I love to make queries of combinations of words and see what comes out. For example I got the posting from the “real yellow pages” suggesting that it’s very important to keep your phone book close at hand when preparing for a hurricane. Or the posting that there is a ranking for colleges based on reports of how healthy their squirrel population is. I love the sendipity of these feeds. I tend to have a 20 at any given time, churning all the time. Pick an unusual word, for example right now I’m watching “unwatering” or a pattern of words (for example: (“duck boat” OR “duckboat” OR “cruise ship”) AND katrina) and see what happens.
More fun at: Feedster, Technorati, IceRocket, BlogPulse, Del.icio.us