I read blogs for my job. I used to read them for fun. There was a certain satisfaction circa 2002 in answering the question, “where did you hear that?” with the name of a blog the other person had never heard of, which by now is a blog that person is sick of reading. Of course, now dogs have blogs. Dogs. Have blogs. This is deplorable. One good thing about the old Internet was that we didn’t know they were dogs. And we thought they were fascinating.
Good blogs have a few things in common. They are the often the product of an obsession, or a collection of obsessions. They are reported. And, yes — well-curated links count as reporting. Good blogs are surprising. They are fresh. They break news. They are visually interesting. They make us laugh. They make us email our friends. They are sometimes deep. They update frequently. In other words, they are nothing like the lame personal blog you are reading.
The true test is whether you return. Here are 10 blogs that get my repeat business. That means their feeds are in my top folder in Google Reader, and I scroll through the headlines every day, even if I don’t read every post. They are not, generally, mean-spirited or political or full of opinion.
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