I don't normally write about other blogs because I am horribly self centred. I also don't write about them because I find the whole self-referential nature of blogging about bloggers to be self-important and parasitic. It reminds me for no very tangible reason of people who used the phrase "postmodern" during the 1990s. Oh and we fear recursion.
Still.
The thing people most like to read about is themselves so it probably isn't a bad idea to have a digression in that sort of direction from time to time. I shall eschew the time honoured tradition of writing about other peoples' articles about me because it is vain and because there are none. Instead I shall give you a portmanteau review of some blogs that I know where "review" means ramble about briefly.
Sites that I: Loathe
Well, that's a bit strong and not entirely accurate. I in fact mean "used to like - a bit - and then went off." But it's not as lithe a phrase. There are only two here - there are of course plenty of others in principle, but only the ones that I have (relatively) recently become disenchanted with are fresh in the memory.
Scott Adams
I stopped reading the Dilbert blog around about the time that Scott stopped saying interesting things and started saying stupid or annoying things instead. I say "around" because I carried on reading for a bit - during which time he adopted the alternate strategies of saying "No, it was just a test, you're stupid for agreeing with me" and "No, I'm right and you only think I'm wrong because of Cognitive Dissonance." I should have stopped reading as soon as he started writing about religion.
Of course Scott is famous for the Dilbert comic strip, not his blog. I stopped reading the comic strip shortly after going off the blog when Scott or his minions or employers, or whatever the relationship is, decided to render the Dilbert website using a bunch of Adobe Flash panels that (a) took forever to load, (b) displayed "off page" in Firefox and (c) were not readable at all because I don't usually install Flash. Presumably this was a good idea for some particular value of "good."
Actually I do very occasionally visit the site when someone sends me a link to a particularly good cartoon because there is in fact a hastily contrived fast page for the whiners like me. Here "fast" is a euphemism for "actually works." Even so, I started to find the relentless uni-joke that people are stupid and annoying kind of stupid and annoying in itself. I moved on to the far more whimsical and variable xkcd instead.
Jeff Attwood
Jeff Attwood writes a blog of technical commentary. It certainly has some redeeming features, amongst them the fact that he is literate and prolific - so there is usually something new to read if the fancy so takes you.
Here I don't know if Attwood went off the boil, or if I just stopped finding the content interesting. Either way, it seems these days to consist mostly of extensive quoting of third party material and paper thin commentary upon it. Sometimes the commentary is conspicuously inaccurate (or imperceptive) too, which doesn't help.
Given the degree of quoting it started to remind me of those insanely nested Usenet "arguments" that go
> > > That shows you > > No that shows you > Loser! Ha! Double loser and no returns!
I think I can live without a return to that.
Sites that I: Like
To my mind it is far more edifying to read positive stuff than negative stuff. There are quite a few writers who suddenly dropped off my must-read list when they started maligning the intellect, attitude, or quality of some other perfectly sane, adjusted, and competent writer.
Obviously I'm doing that in the "Loathe" section above, but I don't have readers to lose. Besides, I may be unusual in this respect - such a lot of people do write derogatory stuff about other people; still, it's not to my taste. So here are some sites that are super in almost every possible way.
Joel Spolsky
The blurb on the backs of Joels' books make him sound terribly interesting because he was in the Israeli military, attended a prestigious university, and runs a software company in Manhattan. In truth he is terribly interesting because he is a fine writer - and no doubt because I happen to be interested in the subjects about which he writes.
His articles are for the most part about the business of running his small software company or about writing software. They are always witty and usually pithy.
Steve Yegge
Steve writes Steve's Blog Rants, or as they once were, Stevey's Drunken Blog Rants on technology. They are probably the most overtly technical of the blogs I list here. Unlike the "rant" appellation that he gives them, they are actually very well thought out essays on technology. Well, actually they might just be rants, but if so they are impeccably spelt, grammatical, accurate, and insightful. Sure, they are written in the style of a stream-of-consciousness diatribe but if that's really what they are then I plan to go around to his house and snap his fingers for making the rest of us look so bloody talentless.
Rory Blythe
I first heard of Rory when he drew the very amusing Excel as a Database cartoon and this appeared in one of Joel's books. Since then I have followed his semi-semi-fictional ramblings on the Neopoleon website. He crafts a good sentence and frequently makes me laugh aloud with an unexpected turn of phrase.
His posts to the site are intermittent which may or may not be the result of his shambolic personal life - it really is very difficult to work out which bits are true - but reliably entertaining when they do eventually emerge.
Stephen Fry
Not exactly a blog, but close enough and I don't think he would object to the term. If you are British you know who he is and already love him or hate him. He is officially a National Treasure. I'm with the people who so acclaim him.
Stephen very occasionally writes an essay for his website, which is then made available simultaneously as an audio-recording or, as he would have it, podgram. Though lamentably infrequent they are excellent. On this site are also his Dork Talk articles for The Guardian newspaper and a few other odds and sods.
He has also appeared in a video on the almost disappointingly squeaky clean (given the name) website VideoJug.
Not Quite Blogs
Most internet writing does not consist of Blogs. Of course most internet writing is barely comprehensible either intentionally as with LOLCats on icanhascheezburger or unintentionally where the comments on YouTube and Slashdot spring pretty forcible to mind.
Some non-blog content is comprehensible, intentional and good though.
Jakob Nielsen
Any number of self styled web designers absolutely hate this guy. His fortnightly articles espouse the benefits of usability testing. This is, of course, thoroughly self-promoting as he is one half of the Nielsen Norman Group who sell reports and consultancy in usability.
They hate him because his site is ugly and because he tells us that pretty sites are less important than usable sites. 90% of criticism levelled at the site consists of "his site is ugly" which is profoundly missing the point.
The occasional people who tell us that it's unusable too never actually perform any empirical testing of this. Naturally the other clarion message of Jakob's site is that opinions and approaches to usability are utterly irrelevant - only testing the site with real users and observing what trips them up is of any value.
Given the gollum-like venom of the designers who despise him you would be hard pressed to dislike his writing in the first place. Still, it's nice that it's also well written and interesting.
Robert X. Cringely
Bob is in the non blog section only because he claims not to be a blogger (this applies to Jakob and Paul too). In fact he writes what's essentially a tech industry blog every Friday and it's always interesting if not always accurate. But then who is?
Like every other pundit he writes a column every January forecasting the events in the tech industry for the forthcoming year but unlike every other pundit he also reviews and pretty honestly scores his forecasts from the previous January. I think that's rather classy.
Cringely has covered the IT business for long enough now that he has contacts throughout the industry (or says he does), but for me the appeal of his writing is that he doesn't just write about the people in the industry or reminiscence about the good old days of Silicon Valley - instead he sticks his neck out and makes predictions about the behaviour of the various participants. Not always right, but a good read regardless.
Footnote 1: Bob's book Accidental Empires is a fascinating set of stories about the founders of the modern computer industry.
Footnote 2: Bob's real name is not actually Bob. Therein lies a tale.
TED
The TED site contains a mind boggling number of videos of presentations. The videos are usually entertaining, always fascinating, and free. You can watch them online, or you can download them as MP4 video files. The participants are leaders in their fields and for the most part deliver a stunningly good performance.
I particularly recommend the video of Clifford Stoll being self-consciously whacky while measuring the speed of sound.
Footnote 1: Entirely unrelated, but Cliff wrote The Cuckoo's Egg about his experiences tracking down a hacker.
Footnote 2: Some people say that we should use always "Cracker" instead of "Hacker" when speaking of computer crime but honestly they are mostly being silly. Language changes; get over it.
Paul Graham and Hacker News
Paul made his millions selling an internet company to Yahoo and now writes a variety of essays about the creative process as understood by a technical and commercially minded individual. He touches on philosophy, business, sociology, and art in his writing as well, but its his digressions into aesthetics and quality that strike the deepest chords with me.
Last but not least is this discussion website from Paul Graham's startup-investing company Y Combinator. The sites that are linked for discussion are often very interesting and the comments that form the discussion itself seem for the most part to be better thought and more clearly written than is usual.
The site has a nice anti-procrastination feature that allows you to set yourself a quota for the amount of time you allow yourself to spend on the site and the duration that must elapse before you can return to it.
I fear that Hacker News will deteriorate as new users move the mean but for the moment it is a good read.