by CKR
Many thanks to Cernig for bringing my attention to yesterday's observance. I'm a day late, but nothing short in a set of links to excellent blogs. I'm not sure what their ratings are. (Page views? Links? Devoted readers? Nobody really knows how to rate these things, or what a page view or link means in terms of attention.) But I'm pretty sure that, like WhirledView, they don't get the traffic that Huffington Post does. (No link there, notice!)
I particularly enjoy the distinctive voices in the blogs that find ourselves below the salt of media recognition. The MSM are still struggling to make sense of it. Sarah Boxer has reviewed ten books that relate somehow to blogging. She actually seems to have read some blogs, unlike many of the others in the MSM who throw accusations around in fear that we bloggers will show that we actually can do their jobs better. But the blogs she has read are not those on my favorites list, and she is still attracted to those "blogs" that in fact are big business, not opinion or news. My guess is that most of the books have done less than she has.
Chris Mooney opines in the Columbia Journalism Review that bloggers need to follow the Writers' Guild in demanding money for our contributions to the national discussion. I suspect that his concerns, so alien to WhirledView and probably others in the list I'm working up to presenting, stem from his opening phrase: "As a journalist and especially as a blogger,..." He would like to be paid for his blogging, which suggests to me that he is doing something other than what I am. Would I like another check every so often? Sure. Do I think it has anything at all to do with what I'm doing at WhirledView? Not on your life. Mooney is all for making distinctions; after all, that is how he convinces his colleagues that he is one of the in-group.
Were bloggers to organize, a threshold would have to be established between blogging “for fun” and blogging in a way that should be considered “labor”—between amateurs and professionals, if you will.And, of course, he would be one of the more highly regarded professionals.
What I find refreshing about the blogosphere is that those distinctions are not at all clear. Many of us are professionals in the fields in which we blog, or maybe not. What matters is the quality of what we produce. And I do think that the folks who are having fun are more interesting than those doing it for money, or, in the case of the HuffPo, glory, I guess. Mooney informs us that HuffPo's business model depends on free posts.
Here are some blogs of quality, in alphabetical order.
Bouphonia. The same sorts of topics that WhirledView takes on, but a different mix. The Friday nudibranchs are beautiful.
History Unfolding. A well-though-out post approximately once a week.
Itching for Eestimaa. An American in Estonia.
Life After Jerusalem. State Department doings.
NewsHoggers. Today's news, with energy. (And a reciprocal link for yesterday's link to us!)
Phronesisaical. Philosophy you can use, plus tropical fruit.
Pine River World News. Combing the sources so you don't have to from northern Wisconsin. We're having snow here today, too!
Plush Life. Two beautiful cats and more for those of us who aren't able to have our own just now.