Best New Blogs
Bygone Bureau’s best new blogs of 2011.
14 Ways Music Blogs Can Be Useful Again
14 ways music blogs can be useful again. [via]
4) Stop posting so much Seriously. We all read Pitchfork. Putting up 8 posts a day gets you single-post drive-by Hype Machine hits, not readers. Why are you doing this again? 5) “A lot of my readers don’t read Pitchfork.” What, all 10 of them? C’mon.
Looking at Business Insider’s aggregating practices.
So why does Business Insider risk undermining all that highly original, distinctive content for what appear to be roughly 18,000 article views? When media companies are asked to grow at a meteoric pace — and Comscore indicates that Business Insider’s unique visitors have nearly doubled this year — the line between original content and borderline theft gets awful blurry. The editorial mission quickly transforms from “What can I link to?” to “How much can I take?”
And more from Marco Arment.
Why wouldn’t I want to be associated with Business Insider? It has nearly everything that offends me as a web reader and writer: linkbait headlines, more ads than content, more sharing buttons than original words, top-list “slideshows” that make readers click for every item and defraud advertisers into thinking that their pageviews are legitimate, Tynt messing with copy and paste, Vibrant Media’s double-green-underline ads, generic images slapped next to each post (often poorly Photoshopped®), and tabloid coverage of every rumor and inflammatory non-event so they can fight all of the other tabloids for Google’s pennies.
Blogs affect an unhealthy narcissistic attitude. One can spend a lifetime listing all of the blogs that happily remain focused on their topic, but our complaint is about how the blog culture focuses on the use of blogs as a personal extension. Finding avenues to express yourself is healthy, but the contemporary view of blogs make the blog author the focus, not what the author talks about. Blog culture is not about discarding the assumption that it’s “all about us”, blogs are really all about Me Me Me.
Good news, today blogging is totally kind of not dead.
The end of blogging. There is something really missing from this article, though I’m not sure what. Maybe it’s the acknowledgement that there is life outside of New York. (To be fair, it is the New York Observer. Still. Gawker. The Awl. Mediaite. Business Insider. This feels like different chapters in the same book.) Now that I think about it, this is just link bait. Which I’m obliging. [via]
In his November farewell post, after a five-year stint on the Atlantic blog, Marc Ambinder wrote that it will be a relief to head to the National Journal, where he will feel no compulsion to turn every piece into the opinion of “a web-based personality called ‘Marc Ambinder’ that people read because it’s ‘Marc Ambinder,’ rather than because it’s good or interesting.”
Blogs past, present and future.
Meanwhile, Tumblr made blogging beautiful. It makes it so easy to upload or clip and save whatever you come across in your web travels. For the most part, I use it as a visual bookmarking tool. Most Tumblrs are mood boards, a selection of things that resonate in someway to the blogger.
It should also be noted that this post comes via Fimoculous, who has spontaneously been posting again.
