I worked with David Stonehouse as he peered into the overcrowded world of internet opinion - and nominated his top 10 blogs - in an article in Australia's The Age newspaper. The article called "Simply the Best" is a good one.
In the article, David Sifry, CEO of Technorati says there are more than 33 million blogs out there. Finding "the best" is all relative. Although many of the blogs chosen for the article were the usual suspects (Engadget & Boing Boing for example) there were a few gems.
I loved the number 8 choice, a blog by Melbourne, Australia cab driver Adrian Neylan. His self-described "cablog" is a collection of taxi stories plus news and current affairs. I loved Adrian's riff on "new beauty" which is a recap of a conversation with a passenger who had encountered a bevy of models in town for Australian Fashion Week.
"How were they looking, beautiful?" Adrian the cabbie asked.
"Absolutely," the passenger said. "They could park their motors in my bedroom anytime."
"Yeah, but then you’d have to talk to them," Adrian suggested, "which may be a problem given many of them aren’t even old enough to vote, let alone maintain a decent conversation."
Hilarious. You can't make this stuff up. I'll be back to read this cablog again.
At the end of the article Gary Wisniewski was quoted what he calls a frenzy of jokesterism in the blogging world on April Fools Day, with furious linking back and forth between sites. The Melbourne blogger has a great analysis of mutual trackbacks and comment links within the blog world which underscored what he saw as desperation among bloggers - to catch eyeballs and rankings.
"It became painfully obvious that trackbacks and comments have become nothing more than linkbaiting, and despite claims of the opposite, far too many people at the top care far, far too much about their traffic," Wisniewski says in his terrific post.
Yeah, I'm guilty. I’m sending trackback pings to both Gary and Adrian.
