brainwagon

Josh Bancroft decided to post My Top 5 Must Read Blogs, and I realized something: I hate blogs about blogging. And public relations. And the Cluetrain Manifesto.

They bore me. They are populated entirely by pundits who like to talk about how revolutionary blogging is, how companies can use it to sell products and improve their services. Yawn. I might think about that if I was paid to do it it, but I can’t think of why I should do it in my free time.

The blogs I’m interested in are the ones which tell me about stuff I’m interested in. Building stuff. Gadgets. Photography. Podcasting (you know, individuals making podcasts, not corporations trying to exploit a new media outlet). Science.

My top five (warning, I can’t count, so I might add some more, and they are in no particular order) are presented here for your consideration:

• The Make Magazine Blog: No surprise here, I like to tinker and this blog provides a lot of inspiration for tinkering. It has been so inspiring that I formed a little after hours group at work just to work on projects like this for a couple hours each week.
• Good Math, Bad Math: One of my favorite science blogs, mostly ripping apart the use of mathematics to support crackpot ideas like Intelligent Design.
• Bad Astronomy: Astronomer Phil Plait keeps us up to date on cool astronomy and dissects myths and conspiracy theories. He’s a great writer and a lot of fun to read.
• Digital Photography Review: If there is a blog which I consider authorative on the world of digital cameras, Digital Photography Review is it. If you buy a digital camera without consulting it, you… well…. you should have read dpreview.
• Digg and Del.icio.us: Let’s face it, part of the joy of being on the Internet is the serendipity of finding links to things that you didn’t know you’d be looking for. Sites like digg and del.icio.us fill that need.
• The Daily WTF: As long as the Daily WTF has material, I suspect I’ll be able to be gainfully employed as a software engineer.
• Liam’s Pictures from Old Books: Here is a guy who does something I can appreciate: he publishes high resolution scans of old books from his collection, many of them are very, very nice. Great stuff, like these lettering examples.
• Distributed Proofreaders Latest Releases: The Distributed Proofreaders check and correct errors in the scanned versions of books for Project Gutenberg, and publish their completed works as an RSS feed. Some really whacky stuff comes through, some of which I have archived on brainwagon under my Gutenberg Gems topic.

This is some of what I think is cool on the Web. What about you?

[tags]Blog,List,Top Five,Top Ten[/tags]