A Blog About Making Culture
Blogs of the Year: Some Bits - Nelson's Weblog and rc3.org
December 12, 2007
Today's Blog of the Year Picks: Some Bits: Nelson's Weblog and RC3.org.
These two are just for me, some real old-school-blogging nerd picks. Some Bits: Nelson's Weblog is the work of Nelson Minar. Formerly of Google (where he helped pioneer their API work), and lately assisting with Twitter, Nelson is a geek's geek, reveling in coding and gaming and exploring the edges of web culture. But honestly, there are lots of blogs that try to cover that territory. What I love is that there's a real humanity to the way Nelson presents his posts, and he frequently veers from the technical to the political or even the worlds of food and travel while retaining that characteristic warmth. Frankly, if you've been reading or writing blogs long enough, you can remember how blogging used to be, and Nelson's Weblog is old-fashioned in a great way, not least because he still calls it a "weblog". That the sidebar linkblog is so incredibly well-curated and consistently good is the icing on the cake.
In a similar vein, Rafe Colburn's rc3.org is a blog for people who appreciate code, sure. But it's also a rich discussion of politics, community, and culture. For those of you who are newcomers to the blogosphere (that means you showed up in this century), this is what most blogs used to be like. Now, neither Rafe nor I is posting 100 links a month like we used to 8 years ago, but the evolution into a more considered set of brief essays interspersed with interesting links is still satisfying to see done so well, and so consistently, for so long.
Pick of the Posts:
- I found Nelson's sympathetic look at Larry Craig from earlier this year to be particularly moving.
- There is nothing but good in Nelson's "bad" category of posts.
- Quality is the Killer Feature: Inspired by the shutdown of OINK, Rafe neatly sums up a key weakness of digital music marketing efforts thus far.
- And a must-read for anybody who deploys servers or server-based applications: When Deployments Go Wrong
If you like these, try: Hack the Planet. A full 30% of the time, I have no idea what the hell Wes Felter is talking about. Another 20% of the time he's either wrong or just infuriating. These are just two of the best things about his blog if you're a geek.
This is one in a series of posts about Blogs of the Year for 2007. They're my subjective picks about blogs that inspired or influenced me this year, and you can check out my introductory post to find more.
Jeffrey McManus 
Nelson’s blog is what my blog aspires to be on a good day.
Anil
Nelson’s blog: Succint.
I wonder sometimes if blogs should aspire to inducing thinking in the reader.
I would love to read those that meander, heading nowhere in particular, away from the cares of the world.
Howard Berkey
It’s a sure sign of good writing skills when one can be both brief and thought provoking.
Agree completely with your choices; I found my way here from Rafe’s blog, which I read pretty often.
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