Also, in preparation for our discussion, do some wandering around the blogosphere. Leave links in comments to blogs you especially enjoy. Check out some of The Bygone Bureau's "Best New Blogs of 2011." Or Time magazine's "Best Blogs of 2011." Or Saveur magazine's "2011 Best Food Blog Awards." There's even a list of "Top 200 Church Blogs." Whatever type of blog you are interested in, if you Google the phrase "best ___ blog," you will get results.
As you explore, take note of the distinctive features of blogs and how different blogs incorporate them. You will be doing a lot of skimming, but pause and do some close reading, too, so that you can begin to get a sense of what kind of writing works in the blogosphere. Our judgments here will be very subjective, but the point is to try to get a handle on the style and rhetoric of blogs.
It's a great big Internet. Go forth and explore it!
(Photo Credit: Kathy Mackey, Los Angeles, California, known as auntie k on her photo website http://flickr.com/photos/auntikhaki/ [via].)
Here are some blogs I particularly enjoy (not all horse-related, I promise!):
ReplyDeleteHyperbole and a Half: Hilarious/tragic escapades of a jobless twentysomething living in Montana. Rarely updated anymore but some of her images have become internet memes.
hyperboleandahalf.blogspot.com
Fugly Horse of the Day: Explained this one in class a little bit, but it is basically a series of tirades and exposés against irresponsible breeding, horse slaughter, and general stupidness in the world of horses, written with a good dose of snarky humor. The community around this blog has rallied to help several horse rescue causes. Another interesting thing, though, is that the owner of the blog changed three times in the past year. #1 ("Fugly") began the blog and brought it to fame, #2 ("Mugly" of the Mugwump Chronicles blog)bought the blog, estranged a lot of the readers with her fufu silliness, and then #3 is a pair of writers ("Snugly" and "Snarkly" from the Snarky Rider blog) who have a writing style closer to the original Fugly but post more often :)
http://fuglyblog.com/
Etiquette Hell: Posts daily reader-submitted stories of etiquette faux pas up for the judgment of the admin and the general blog-reading public. Good if you want to stockpile appropriate responses to awkward situations or if you just want to read about stupid things other people have done and then judge them for it.
http://www.etiquettehell.com/
S*** My Students Write: Sample sentences from real student essays. Stranger than fiction.
http://shitmystudentswrite.tumblr.com/
3 of my favorite blogs are
ReplyDelete1) design-milk.com/ Design Milk is a blog centric site devoted to modern interior design, architecture, and art.
2) manmadediy.com/ Man Mad DIY is great because there are so many DIY fru fru crafty girly blogs, but he re-appropriated it for manly purposes like Batman's letterhead.
3) thxthxthx.com THXTHXTHX "Leah Dieterich's mother always told her to write thank you notes. So she does. To everything. thxthxthx is her daily exercise in gratitude." This one is so cute because every day she writes a thank you note on a sticky to something in her life.
oh and this is the blog I write for work: granitegrannies.com/blog
I haven't done too much exploring but one blog that I frequent often is the Sartorialist (http://www.thesartorialist.com/). I'm a huge fan of the combination of fashion, photography, and pretentiousness that the blog provides
ReplyDeleteI mostly use twitter to follow links to good blog articles to read, and up to now haven't particularly read any specific blogs on a regular basis. As I have been exploring blogs more, these three blogs are the most helpful I have found so far in guiding my thinking about how to design my blog.
ReplyDelete1) Rogue Medic – www.roguemedic.com - One focus of the blog is EMS Education. The Rogue Medic takes a direct approach at tackling the cultural problems that plague EMS and helps to advance the field as a healthcare profession.
2) The Happy Medic – Justin Schorr – www.thehappymedic.com - Written by the creator of the EMS 2.0 movement. The Happy Medic combines a very sarcastic sense of humor with an extremely open mind and presents readers with fascinating new ideas for EMS from around the world.
3) Statter911 – Dave Statter – www.statter911.com - Dave Statter was a volunteer firefighter before he became a news reporter in the Washington DC area. Now he is retired and runs an extremely active blog about the Fire Service. One of the main focuses of the blog is on how fire departments can help portray themselves favorably in the public eye.
My favorite blogs are probably travel/world based blogs with a comical slant.
ReplyDeletePerhaps my all time favorite was "Demonbaby" - a blog of an artist, where he had posts and rants about bizarre places he visited (from strange monuments to hilarious porno shops). It is currently on hiatus - one of my favorites was his visit to the "Creation Museum" - a museum on the psuedoscience of creationism: http://www.demonbaby.com/blog/2008/06/exploring-creation-museum-americas-new.html
Another very funny, and very recent one, is the animated narrative blog, Books of Adam: http://www.booksofadam.com/
I spend a good amount of time looking at blogs, but for the most part I tend to follow links that pique my interest in whatever I happen to be reading (I call it the Wikipedia effect. You can start at the wiki article for Thomas Jefferson and after 5 clicks you find yourself reading about the 1969 World Series). But that means I have to start somewhere, right? Well, here are three of my "starter" blogs:
ReplyDelete1) Shutdown Corner – This is Yahoo! Sports's blog for the NFL. I'm a huge sports fan. This blog has several contributors who all offer great insight (although one in particular, Chris Chase, sadly seems destined to being viciously torn apart in the comments section of all his posts). Of course they focus a lot on the goings-on of the NFL today, but they really do a great job of weaving non-football topics into the football talk.
http://sports.yahoo.com/blogs/nfl-shutdown-corner/
2) Pastepunk – Pastepunk.com is a music blog that covers underground alternative music. It's been around since well before there was even the word "blog," but one glance at there main page will show you that it definitely is a blog. Interesting note: Pastepunk was started in 1998 right out of a dorm room here on campus. This blog mostly keeps up with what is currently relevant. There are a lot of reviews, interviews, and opinion pieces.
http://www.pastepunk.com/site/
3) Drum Bum – This is probably the most personally particular blog I follow, as I'm a drummer myself. There's not much I can say about this blog besides that they mostly post videos, articles, and links. What makes me feel this blog was worthy to add to this list is that it's a great example of an extremely particular "niche" blog, so to speak.
whoops! Drum Bum link: http://drumbum.wordpress.com/
DeleteSome of my favorite blogs to visit...
ReplyDelete+ Smart Pretty and Awkward -- I've read this one since high school- the young woman who writes it makes each post just three tips. One about how to be smarter, one about how to be prettier, and one about how to be (less) awkward. But it's not condescending in the least- she's classy, helpful and honest. Each post is also titled with a somewhat random, but thought provoking, quote.
+ Sweet Tooth & That's So Michelle -- Baking blogs with all sorts of good cupcake and interesting jello shot recipes, with some other recipes too.
+ Betches Love This -- Very funny blog about betches. They recently changed the whole format of the site though, and it's not as good as it used to be, but still pretty good.