Best and Worst of 2004: Weblogs
Best Weblog of 2004: Half of How to Save the World by Dave Pollard. His extensive writing on alternatives to mainstream business practices emphasizing a non-hierarchical (or at least not rigidly hierarchical), self-selecting, partnership- and innovation-based, relatively small businesses staffed by people who love what they do so much the would do it for free (but find being paid for it more than acceptable) is inspiring, my never having worked for an organization larger than 20 people. His writing on love (the only healthy addiction) and sex are not to be missed, and in general he's on to something when he says the way we're doing things is probably counter to our nature as human beings. Another memorable article he wrote this year argued that violence in revenge is a learned behaviour unique to humans.
Honourable Mentions: Karl & Cow, beautiful photos and poignant writing, renewing my interest in studying the French language; Darren Barefoot filtered out the good stuff from the sites (like Boing Boing, MetaFilter, Slashdot, etc.) that were supposed to do that in the first place; Management by Baseball renewed my interest in baseball and taught me about management (not that I'll ever need the knowledge); Marginal Revolution renewed my interest in economics; Makeoutcity summarized books so I didn't have to read them.
Best New Weblog of 2004: Hanzi Smatter. There was even an academic paper written about the website and the phenomenon it traced, namely non-Chinese people and their silly Chinese tattoos or clothing with Chinese characters on them. The weblog mostly catalogued the misuse of characters, especially when they formed meaningless (or worse, offensive) phrases, or that were incorrectly drawn.
Honourable Mention: Blog Maverick, billionaire Mark Cuban's weblog. He has his own agenda—I understand what he said about his relationship with Steve Nash may not be fully accurate—but his writing about basketball from an owner's perspective is a welcome change from the usual former-player's or fan's perspective.
Worst Weblog of 2004: The other half of How to Save the World by Dave Pollard. His anti-Bush, anti-American, doom-and-gloom environmentalist screeds are not only ineffective, but counterproductive. On top of that, when he cites offline materials of which there is an online copy, he does not link to the source: on three occasions: privately for a January citation (available online), publicly in the comments for a November citation (available online). Giving credit where it is due, he does link to an external Gladwell reference at least once. He very rarely links to external sites, much less other bloggers, except on his sidebar, which barely anybody reading his site through his RSS feed will bother to even check. Most of his links to individual weblog entries are to his own, which is actually fine, since I do it as well, but for someone who uses the blogging medium fairly effectively and is a strong proponent of it, he does not provide ample evidence that he is following the conversations happening in it. Again, giving credit where it is due, , and a more rigorous analysis of his linking policy is probably necessary for me to make any final opinion on the matter. An improved "How To Save the World" does not stop talking about environmental philosophy or American politics—I ignore them anyway, and besides, not discussing those subjects is a dealbreaker for Dave—but rather has more confidence to link to the external sources it cites so that its readers can come to their own conclusions about the source.
