What’s Your Favorite Blog Entry?

One of the most memorable blog entries for me was Clay Shirky’s Power Logs, Weblogs, and Inequality, written almost 2 years ago. (I started blogging a few months later)

The reason why this resonated with me was because it was the first time I started thinking about blogs giving everyone/anyone a voice. Though not stated explicitly in Shirky’s post, it was the start (in my head) of thinking about how technology can spread democracy. Is that a pipe dream? I don’t know, but it sure is nice to think about.

Of late I would have to say Peter Morville’s post entitled User Experience Design (or what some of us like to refer to as "The Honeycomb Post").

I can’t find it now, but Mark Pilgrim’s entry on addiction, and then the whole saga that followed, about work and writing and being true to one’s self, just sorta blew my mind. I was still fairly new to the medium myself, and it was an eye-opener, both to the consequences and to the power of words in this context. (Funny, then, that I can’t find any of it now. I don’t know if that’s a permalink problem, or if he’s just erased everything. The latter would be a real shame.)

Ah, he moved the addiction stuff here: http://addictionis.org/

But I still can’t find the piece on writing, which I vaguely remember the outlines of.

I think I followed his work so intensely because I loved how he was a whole and open person on the screen: technical stuff sitting side-by-side with really personal passionate writing.

I appreciate Shelley Powers the same way, I think.

Kottke’s Sherfari post was the first I’d seen of a blogger actually participating in the development of the internet experience. It took blogs past “online journals” to “creation tools” for me.

Tough question to answer, but the one blog post that really got me going was Dave Winer’s Two Way Web essay. That inspired me to think about the Web as a read/write environment and how new tools such as RSS and blogging software was “bootstrapping” this new world. It inspired the name of my weblog and got me up and running in the blogging world.

Honourable mentions also go to these posts/essays, which I found truely inspirational:

* Anil Dash’s Microcontent Client
* Jon Udell’s Grade School CMS Lessons

My favorite blog entries tend to be in a critical or “creative writing” mode, but at this early stage I prefer anything that reminds us that blogging is a new form that hasn’t yet ossified into something that demands a specific style, approach, or set of topics. Standout examples might include Ray Davis’s amazing series on Elvis and authenticity (and I don’t even remember what else), and Ronnie Cordova’s charming “beard of bees“.

And then I have two examples of disapppointments: Mark Pilgrim’s “Dive Into Accountability“, in which he introduced a CVS-like revision history for his weblog; plus the generally negative reaction to the news that Jonathon Delacour’s “Ikuko’s name” was not entirely autobiographical, if at all. The Mark Pilgrim example has to generalized to be meaningful, since it was in most senses a salvo in his feud with Dave Winer, but I think both examples illustrate a tendency to see blogging as something that is primarily earnest, transparent, and representational, like journalism, tech writing, or diary writing. I read and enjoy journalistic blogs, technical blogs, and online diaries, but I certainly don’t think that list of three modes exhausts the possibilities of blogging, and I hope others don’t, either.

I actually remember the first (maybe one of the first) blog experiences that I had, quite a long time ago. Looking for stuff on faceted classification, and came across this post by Peterme:
http://www.peterme.com/archives/00000063.html

Got me into reading blogs and later blogging.

(PS - at first I thought the preview box was cool, but it quickly became distracting as I was trying to write)

It was one of the SimpleBits articles for sure. I think it was Simplified CSS Tabs Trick