25 Best Blogs of 2009?

Time Magazine (are we still calling it a “magazine”?) has posted “Best Blogs 2009“, their second annual list of the “best blogs in the world”. A few notes before we dig in to their choices:

• It is currently mid-February. It might be a good idea to wait until December is a bit closer before making our “best of” lists.
• By various counts, there are at least 200 million blogs in the world. Either Time spent an incredible amount of time and effort on this, or…well, they didn’t. The fact that most of their choices can be found on Technorati’s list of the most popular blogs would suggest the latter.
• Though a list of 25 items could easily fit on one page, Time puts each and very entry on a separate page. This is designed to get 25 clicks and 25 page-views from every reader, inflating Time’s perceived popularity. It’s actually pretty smart, but also rather annoying to the reader.
• This is basically their version of linkbait – the method used by bloggers to get others to link to their posts (as I did above), increasing their rankings in Google. Lists are the most common form of this technique – anytime you see a blog post starting with a number (“25 best ____”, 5 Ways To ____”, “10 New ____”), you’re looking at linkbait. Including when I do it.
• Time’s post also incorporates two other well-known forms of linkbait: the “useful” post, and the “controversial” post. Casual readers will be attracted to it as a useful list, tech-savvy types will be complaining all day about it on their blogs – as I am doing now. See how it works?

As a kicker, in case they didn’t generate enough controversy, there’s a list of the 5 Most Overrated Blogs, sure to get a few more people ticked off, and generate five more page-views per reader.

Oddly enough, Gawker.com went from last year’s “best” to this year’s “most overrated”. Apparently in 2008 “Gawker’s relentlessly critical, headache-inducing cynicism” was a good thing, but in 2009 “the economic downturn and the near-collapse of Wall Street has made Gawker’s snarky worldview seem not only cruel but pointless.”

Oh, Time. The zeitgeist is getting sore from you having your finger on it.

As a service to you the reader, and because my annoyance knows no bounds, I present here Time’s lists on one page. The only value Time adds for your clicks is a screenshot of each, and a short paragraph seemingly written by someone on the way to work.

Time’s 25 Best Blogs 2009:

1. Talking Points Memo
2. The Huffington Post (down from #1 last year. Perhaps it was that little plagiarism problem.)
3. Lifehacker
4. Metafilter
5. The Daily Dish
6. Freakonomics
7. BoingBoing
8. Got2BeGreen
9. Zen Habits
10. The Conscience of a Liberal: Paul Krugman
11. Crooks and Liars
12. Generación Y
13. Mashable
14. Slashfood (“Slashfood is food for thought”…ugh. Didn’t they teach you about lazy writing in journalism school?)
15. Official Google Blog
16. synthesis (the choices are getting a bit better – this is a pretty thoughtful, interesting one)
17. bleat (a “pop culture ephemera” blog – not bad, but much like 100,000 others)
18. /Film
    
19. Seth Godin’s Blog (bleh. Self-important aphorisms daily from a self-proclaimed web guru, followed by slobbering fanboy comments. No thanks.)
    
20. Deadspin: Sports News
    
21. Dooce (riding out her micro-fame. I don’t care about your OB-GYN visit, really.)
    
22. Confessions of a Pioneer Woman (they had blogs on the frontier?)
    
23. Said the Gramophone (how did they choose one mp3 blog?)
24. Detention Slip (something about education apparently)
25. Bad Astronomy

Hey Time, what was your mission again?

15 Reasons Twitter Must Die

“What are you doing?”

That’s the question Twitter asks. And it requests your answer in a 140-character text box.

Stay connected with your friends! Be part of a global community! Join the conversation!

No thanks.

Sorry, I know it’s last year’s news, but Twitter sucks. Here is a starter list of reasons why. Please feel free to add your own.

1. “What we’re doing” is usually petty, mundane and boring. No one cares what you have for lunch, even if you are Shaquille O’Neal. You are just not as important as you think you are. I say this with love.
2. Random replies and disjointed conversations that make no sense to anyone else, except when arranged in a thread by a plug-in, add-on or widget. It’s like instant messaging without features!
3. The inevitable plug-ins, add-ons and widgets to make Twitter useful. If it’s not useful in the first place, why use it?
4. If you can express it in 140 characters, it probably took less time to actually do it live than to “tweet” it. Whatever you said you were doing, you just stopped to tweet about it.
5. The word “tweet“.
6. Text messaging achieves the same purpose without sending your micro-details to everyone. Anywhere else that’s called “spamming”. Yes, I know they opted in as your “followers“, but they’ll be opting back out soon enough.
7. “Following” someone is not healthy, whether you’re a stalker, a cult member or a Twitter user.
8. Transparency is not always good. Public toilets should not have glass walls. The word of the year for 2008: “oversharing“.
9. The word of 2009: “micro-fame“. You heard it here first. It’s somewhere below reality show fame, and just above getting your mug shot on the Smoking Gun. I also predict this will lead to the unfortunate word of 2010: “micro-lame”.
10. Twitter is cutesy and bubbly and looks like a toy. Because it is a toy.
11. “But the San Diego fires/San Francisco mudslides/(insert big news) story was broken on Twitter!” Fine, but shouldn’t those people have called 911 and then maybe tried to help, instead of attempting to gain some micro-fame (see?) by “breaking” a story we all would have heard about 5 minutes later?
12. The inevitable “I was fired because I Twittered about my employer” lawsuit and “Twitter addiction” news stories.
13. The constant conversation about ”how to monetize Twitter“, and the inevitable $19.95 e-book to explain how it can make you rich with little or no effort.
14. The more popular it gets, the worse it gets. I’m no elitist (well, maybe), but have you looked at MySpace lately? QED.
15. Twitter is just another tool to replace the voices in your head, ignore your soul-crushing job, and numb you to the yawning chasm of emptiness that is your life.

And did I mention the word “tweet“?