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?

Twitter Fails Once Again, Slavish Devotion Continues

Nice grammar.

Previously I’ve written of my hatred for Twitter, including 15 Reasons Twitter Must Die, 1500 More Reasons Twitter Must Die, Twitter Fails Again, Twitter Officially Goes Mainstream, and Why is Mashable Obsessed with Twitter?. Not belabor the point (well perhaps), I’m afraid we need to revisit the issue. So let’s call this a series.

If your cell phone service occasionally went dead for an hour, would you be ranting all over the internet about how great it was? 

If the post office sometimes just didn’t deliver the mail for a day…OK, bad example.

How about if your cable or satellite TV went down during a big game like the Superbowl – even if you were watching something else? And next, during the World Series of Poker? And then during fairly-popular episodes of Oprah? Would you be excitedly proclaiming your provider’s greatness in your blog and encouraging others to use it?

As of today, Twitter worship continues, and yet this glorified Fisher-Price toy remains as unreliable as ever. This morning, TechCrunch reports on another Twitter outage, this time due to a “database problem“.

OK, fine. We all have our database problems now and then. My problem isn’t with the people at Twitter, though their Jack and Jill Magazine attitude toward their own failures must even get on their fans’ nerves sometimes:

No, my problem is with the slobbering fanboys and fangirls who are basing their monumentally pointless lives around it.

An exaggeration, you say? Let’s look again at Mashable, whose Twitter fandom remains unabated. On Monday, they posted the horrible “HOW TO: Live Inside Twitter and Still Stay Productive“  by Elliott Kosmicki, which recommends using Twitter to accomplish various important tasks. A few of his most ridiculous:

• Manage to do lists (“Next time you’re telling your followers what you ate for lunch, you can also make a note to call the cute waitress you met while you were there.” Yes, I’m sure she’ll be impressed when you tell her the story of how you twittered yourself a to-do note about her.)
• Set a timer (Be sure and use it for really important things, like “remember to feed the baby”. And what device are you using to access Twitter anyway? Does it not have a built-in clock?)
• Get your flight information (Are you really going to depend on Twitter to help you get to the airport on time? If so, you deserve to miss that plane.)
• Track your expenses (Sounds like a solid plan. I’m sure the security is top-notch.)
• Get news alerts (Because you can never have enough news alerts. Hey, have they found Caylee yet?)
• Track packages (“If you’re like me and spend too much time tracking your latest Amazon order…” No, thankfully, I am nothing like you.)

Elliott isn’t the only offender, of course. In fact he’s not even close to the worst. Take Darren Rowse of the execrable Problogger.net (How to make your blog stand out? “Pick a unique topic”). Darren smelled the money and started a Twitter-specific site, the atrociously-named Twitip.com. Are these people unaware of the meaning of the word “twit”, or is there some type of irony involved?

The titles of the posts tell an ugly tale of pointlessness: 

• How to Target and Attract High Quality Twitter Followers from Your Blogging Niche (because we don’t just want ordinary readers, we want “high-quality niche eyeballs”) 
• Would you say what you say on Twitter if it was a Real Life Face to Face Interaction? (What would you say if I suggested you had no social skills?) 
• Helping others leads to Twitter Success (which contains the odious terms “Twitterating” and “Twitternation”)
• Using your Blog to Promote Twitter, (“Twitterverse”, “Tweeple”)
• The Quest for 5000 – How many Followers are Enough
• And the question on all our minds, Does The Way You Twitter Cause You Stress?.

There are so many more examples of sites like this, but my brain hurts already. So in summation: if you find yourself acting anything like these people, please seek help. And please don’t tweet about it.

Inaugural Fun: Make Your Own Obama Icon

The good folks at Paste Magazine are definitely in on the spirit of inaugural fever with this gadget:

http://obamiconme.pastemagazine.com

…which they describe succinctly:

 Make your own “Obamicon” — your image in a style inspired by Shepard Fairey’s iconic poster.

[...]

Take your picture with a webcam or upload a photo, choose your own message, and submit to the gallery. 

It requires Flash Player 10, which took me about 20 seconds to download and install, and there is a quicky email registration. 

Then it’s pure fun. Upload a photo or use a webcam to take your pic. Mac iSight users: right click the frame, click “Settings”, and choose “USB Video Class Video” (sic).

Then choose your tagline. Think: as Obama is to “Hope”, you are to “________”.

I thought this really captured my spirit. I tried one in drag for “Change”, but it didn’t quite work out…

Have fun!