We're Going On A Blog Hunt - Part One

Time.com have recently compiled their First Annual Blog Index, which as far as I can tell, is not so much an ‘index’ as a list of what the author considers to be the 25 best blogs out there today. Since I’ve been looking for some new sites to visit, I’ve decided to trawl through each of the blogs on the list, and see if I find them of interest or not. And since I’ve been looking for some new subjects to write about, I’m going to record my impressions here. Hopefully, you’ll find something interesting as well – those who find my blog naivete amusing and/or infuriating are best advised to turn away now.

The ‘Powerpoint Anthology of Literature’ feature on Radosh.net sounds impossible to resist, so I’m going to start there. It’s pretty cool in a geekish-bookwormish sort of way (I personally like the Lolita slide), but sadly, there’s not nearly enough of it (hmm, this sounds like a job for…). Elsewhere, to coincide with the Time listing, Mr. Radosh has helpfully put up a list of ‘greatest hits’ for newcomers. His voluminous writings on the teenage girl band Huckapoo (yes, Huckapoo) again prove that satire has not a hope in hell of keeping up with reality, as do the various entries on media censorship. Make sure to check out a few of the ‘New Yorker Cartoon Anti-Caption Contests’, where readers are invited to ‘submit the worst possible caption’ for a cartoon from the New Yorker magazine. Funny site – shall visit in future.

The Reverse Cowgirl sounds like the second-most impossible thing to resist, so let’s go there next. As the title implies, the subject of this blog is pornography (yeah, don’t try looking at it at work, folks), with ‘Porn Valley’, USA, on centre stage. The author’s more recent posts have tended to focus upon the creative process involved in writing a novel based in this infamous area of the world. Alright, alright, I had actually never heard of ‘Porn Valley’, and that pretty much explains why, although I think this blog is well written, I’m probably not going to be a regular visitor. Worth a look though.

According to voters at the Time.com site, Indexed currently has the highest average rating of the 25 blogs. It’s certainly a clever idea – using Venn diagrams and other graphical tools to make comments about the world – but how can you sustain that for over 1000 posts? Well, apparently you can… I can see that one might become addicted to it, but I wonder if reading too many entries could start making you go a little loopy. User beware.