Help me: What are your favorite weblogs?
The Car Talk guys say these are the magic words: “I’m in trouble and I need your help.” So. Here’s the help I need:
We’re overhauling our company weblog. Researching what makes an informative blog, what makes an active blog, and what makes a linked-to blog. We have clients who want one or all of those situations, and we (of course) would very much like that ourselves.
I’ve been drawing from my own experience blogging here and reading hundreds of others. But most of my weblogs are political. Most of my regular readers here (for some strange reason given my content) are not. So if you would, help me out a little.
No, there’s not a marketing survey for advertisements.
Tell me what your favorite weblogs are. Do you comment? What kinds of posts encourage you to comment? Are there excellent, authoritative blogs you read that you never comment on? And any other ideas you may have about what makes a good blog. I don’t care if the examples are industry-specific or just your grandmother’s knitting blog.
Another possible thing to speak to: when corporate types try to make a weblog or use social media, what are some of the things they do that turn you off?
If you don’t want to post a comment here, email me directly: .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address).
Thanks!
Just a few that are in my feedreader.
Art
http://www.urbansketchers.com/
http://billsharp.wordpress.com/
http://nathanfowkes-sketch.blogspot.com/
http://www.linesandcolors.com/
http://illustrationart.blogspot.com/
Trends, <span class=“caps”>UX,</span> Etc.
http://www.trendsspotting.com
http://www.uxmag.com/
http://www.blogpulse.com
http://webworkerdaily.com/
http://www.boxesandarrows.com
http://www.readwriteweb.com/
Design, Web, <span class=“caps”>CSS,</span> Visualization
http://ffffound.com
http://abduzeedo.com/
http://www.webcreme.com/
http://www.unmatchedstyle.com/
http://cssmania.com/
http://www.cssimport.com/
http://veerle.duoh.com/index.php/blog/index/
http://www.stylegala.com/
http://netdiver.net/
http://infosthetics.com/
Photog
http://mediastorm.org/blog/
http://flak-photo.my-expressions.com/index.html
http://www.filemagazine.com/thecollection/
http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/
Popular Shit
http://lifehacker.com/
http://www.43folders.com/
Creativity
http://blog.creativethink.com/
Marketing / PR
http://www.micropersuasion.com/
http://brandautopsy.typepad.com/brandautopsy/
Tasteful nudity is a plus.
What turns me off a website faster than <span class=“caps”>ANYTHING </span>else is having to use the latest greatest code which invariably causes my obsolete browser to load slowly or hang up and die. This was true when I used Windows 3.1, it was true in Windows 98, it’s true in <span class=“caps”>OSX</span> 10.3 and it’ll be true a couple of years after I buy my next computer, whenever that ends up being. I like sites that are lean on code and rich in text content with optional loading for video & sound (I’ve now got enough bandwidth for large static images but I used dialup until a couple of years ago.)
If it’s a business or organization info site it should be updated regularly. That may be daily, weekly, monthly or quarterly depending on the nature of the beast. Especially calendars, nothing sucks worse than finding out something really cool happened several months ago and you didn’t know about it. Contact information should be easy to find (including telephone and postal addresses if applicable).
Advertising. It’s a necessary evil (apparently.) Don’t let advertisers make your site hard to use. Ads that leap out over the article, make noise, or crash browsers are not doing you or your users any favors. Interstitial ads are the worst because they waste my time loading and then they waste my time running video or some crap. Sure, they have a "click to skip the ad" button but I’ve noticed that is more likely to restart the ad than make it go away. Ads that pause when they aren’t the active window, same deal. If a site runs that crap I will get my information elsewhere because I am <span class=“caps”>NOT INTERESTED </span>and detest my eyeballs being hijacked.
Whew.
I usually don’t read comments on forums that aren’t moderated because I get tired of the troll brigade. I appreciate discussion and differing viewpoints so long as people aren’t being assholes but sadly there is a lot of stupid on the internet. Making Light has an awesome and well-moderated (almost self-moderating) commentariat and a great signal-to-noise ratio.
Lifehacker and woot.com
I generally don’t comment, which is why I don’t get uptight that few comment on my site(s).
For education, I read Always Learning (http://mscofino.edublogs.org/) yet I’ve never made a comment there. Eduwonk (http://www.eduwonk.com/) is another one in this category.
I comment most often on blogs about religion and politics. However, there have been many times that a required Blogger account or some other blogger-imposed obstacle has made me simply say, "Not worth it." Easy commenting is the key for me.
Most often, though, I’m interested in friends’ blogs. My "Friends/Acquaintances" folder at Bloglines gets the first click every time, and there I’m interested only in content.
Don’t know if any of this helped, but you are in my "Friends/Acquaintances" folder at Bloglines, so…
I rarely comment, and only when I have something to say, and I visit for content. No <span class=“caps”>RSS </span>feed is usually a deal breaker, and I’m not too keen on feeds that only show part of the post of subject header.
Some personal favorites that I read often, if not daily, include:
Cynical-C: http://www.cynical-c.com/
Gerry Canavan: http://gerrycanavan.blogspot.com/
Defective Yeti: http://www.defectiveyeti.com/
Homo Sum: http://www.chrismclaren.com/blog
TV Squad: http://www.tvsquad.com/
Bookslut: http://www.bookslut.com/blog/
Hacking Netflix: http://www.hackingnetflix.com/
Minor Tweaks: http://www.minortweaks.com/
Neil Gaiman: http://journal.neilgaiman.com/
Progressive Ruin: http://www.progressiveruin.com/
SF Signal: http://www.sfsignal.com/
SF Scope: http://sfscope.com/
Waxy.org Links: http://www.waxy.org/links/
Mark Evanier: http://www.newsfromme.com/
Tor: http://www.tor.com/
There’s a bunch more, including this blog, and a bunch I read for purely personal reasons that might not appeal to other general readers. But that’s a good sample.
I agree with rebel squirrel…I’m turned off by blitz and bling…simple formatting is best for me. I absolutely hate my local paper’s "active site". I want to be able to do a simple copy and paste from a website for all sorts of reasons…recipes, to save a story that I found of interest, etc. The complicated code pages don’t make that an easy process. I like the <span class=“caps”>KISS </span>design credo.
____I also agree with rebsquirrel about the updating…unless you’re building a "yellow page" sort of ad page, you’d better plan on updating it frequently and keeping the calendar information current.
____Most artists sites pretty much suck because of overly complicated design. I get frustrated quickly and rarely spend much time at these sites.