I’ve been without the means, motive or opportunity to spend kwality time online the last few days, so it was with huge amusement that I found the excellent Pretty Good on Paper had written the following on his blog two days ago:
Kuipercliff, one of a small but growing group of bloggers out there who are talking about technology stuff while running along the knife-edge between opaque and patronizing [link]
This curious extolment got me into his list of 5 Thinking Bloggers, another one of those link memes that snake their way through the undergrowth of the web. Mr Cave Blogem has written his usual very funny take on the matter, including the above description of this blog, which is still making me laugh. I’d love to know who the other folk are who are treading such a precipitous path between obfuscation and being downright annoying. The group is growing, he says: are you one?
I’ve seen this meme knocking around since February, but in the spirit of the thing, here are my five nominations for Thinking Blogger Awards. I’ve excluded a host of ‘big boys’ like BLDGBLOG, Subtopia, John Robb, Bruce Sterling, etc, that I’m a big fan of, in favour of some perhaps less well-known, but equally worthy, bloggers, who hopefully won’t be too annoyed at being tagged. Frankly, I’m more interested in giving them traffic than getting links back, so I sure won’t be offended if any of them ignore this.
- Architectradure: can you be in love with a blog? I don’t know, but Cati Vaucelle’s blog is a fascinating rollcall of invention and digital innovation that springs from her research at MIT Media Lab, and life in general.
- neW Media Wanderings: Twan Eikelenboom is a Dutch student writing about digital media, mapping and perception that always makes me look at our world from different angles.
- reBang: “product design, virtual design, transreality technologies, mixed reality convergence, and that which binds them.” C. Sven Johnson only uses three tags: cyberspace, meatspace and transreality. A must-read.
- Bouphonia: “An Intermittent Trickle of Blandiloquent Suasion and Recondite Opacity.” Undoubtedly less opaque than me, and a cornucopia of stuff.
- Paleo-Future: “a look into the future that never was”. As we speculate about our technological destinies, this prolific blog takes us on a tour of yesteryear’s imaginings of their futures.
Congratulations, you won a Thinking Blogger Award!
Those of you I have “tagged” above, here are the rules of participation:
If, and only if, you get tagged, write a post with links to 5 blogs that make you think. Link to this post so that people can easily find the exact origin of the meme.
Optional: Proudly display the ‘Thinking Blogger Award’ with a link to the post that you wrote (here is an alternative silver version if gold doesn’t fit your blog).
Update 22nd April: I had completely forgotten that Rod (Perfectly Reasonable Deviations) nominated me sometime in March. That one slipped past me, so sorry Rod! Perhaps that was why I didn’t nominate him this time around, although he was certainly on the shortlist. Perhaps I should nominate myself for a ‘Thinking-About-Other-Things’ Blogger Award?
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Hey, thanks for the nomination
have to check this out I guess!
Flattered. Thank you.
A meme I can support (or try to). Will give it some thought.
To pass on, or not to pass on, that is the question… Always a conundrum, I agree.
Sweet
I passed it on! (I would have selected csven as well hehe)
http://architectradure.blogspot.com/2007/04/thinking-about-blogs.html
I wasn’t giving thought to supporting this meme; only to deciding which blogs to include. This is a nice one, imo. We could do with more like it.
And cati, I’d have included your site as well.
Anyway, my entry: http://blog.rebang.com/?p=1248
Don’t worry! Be happy…
I don’t have the ego need to be nominated by everyone. Still, it’s nice to be nominated by fellow bloggers whose work I do appreciate, such as yourself. According to the so-called rules of the thinking blogger awards, you cannot nominate me, since I nominated you. Whatever…
The one good thing about such awards is that one gets to direct one’s blog readers to other cool blogs, and vice versa. I have found a few new great blogs like this…
Yep, I’ve found a whole bunch of excellent blogs care of this particular brand of linkage. How long can this particular one carry on, I wonder? I guess until the good blogs run out … Let’s hope thats’ a looong time.
Indeeed there are a handful of excellent blogs out there!
When I think of it, in the last 12 months or so I have pretty much abandoned mainstream media.
In the 21st century, there are no middlement controlling the flow on information. That is good and bad, and the consequences will be dramatic.
Exciting times those we live in…
… in the last 12 months or so I have pretty much abandoned mainstream media…
That’s true for me, as well. The only time I’ve watched news on television, for example, has been when I’m abroad, and it’s usually been BBC World, by default it seems, although I’ve seen a fair amount of al-Jazeera too. I haven’t bought a newspaper in nearly a year.
The only way I generally end up at mainstream outlets is via blogs! And that’ll be the online versions of whatever medium is traditionally represented by the media provider.
I suspect there are several factors at play, principal amongst them being the filtering offered by RSS, etc, and the specificity of many blogs. There are also issues of authorial voice, trust, discretion, etc. Information wants to be free, it seems, and blogs are a primary conduit of unfettered data exchange.
Couple this with Wikipedia and Google, and social networking, and quite frankly there aren’t enough hours in the day to settle down with a newspaper or the 10pm news! The consequences are already dramatic, relative to even three years ago, and, as you say, things are only going to get more interesting. Good and bad, no doubt. Watch this space has turned into ‘watch every space’…
As a drive-by reader I read the blogs where the author steers me. I accumulate a scope and vision of the world (known and speculated) more than I would of been able to concieve of alone. You people are birthing a new language whose affects I can only speculate about, but whatever medicine you are mixing up is sure to be interesting.