I mentioned in Decluttering my digital inboxes that I'd been pruning my feed reader. The ones I removed were either defunct, not as interesting as they used to be, or interesting but wrongly paced (IO9 for instance is a great way to keep up on the trashy side of science-fiction media — if you can cope with 20 posts a day. I can't.)

Poking through the list of blogs I read regularly did let me figure out which I really like, at least by one measure — the ones where I pinned hundreds of articles to read for later in 2008. Usually these have a common mood rather than a narrow subject, and a pretty eclectic range of links.

My (Roughly) Top 5 Blogs

1. Coilhouse "A love letter to alternative culture" — Coilhouse is for people who miss Mondo 2000 and think that goth is not quite dead yet. What's startling about Coilhouse is how easily it could be crappy and how not-crappy they mostly manage to be. The trick seems to be to actually take things seriously and go light on the snark. I approve.
2. Kottke – This is sort of like saying you like The Beatles. But I do like the Beatles! Kottke has had the best links for years.
3. Warren Ellis – Warren Ellis writes comic books and is a filthy, filthy man. Read with caution, and don't look at any link he prefaces with "What is best in life?" unless you're already a hardened BME reader. (And if you don't know what I'm taling about, you really don't want to click on those links).
4. Tor– relatively new effort by a science-fiction publisher to correct online for the slowly-dying offline science-fiction magazine market.
5. Waxy – If Kottke is The Beatles, Waxy is The Rolling Stones.

And to go with that, I sampling of new blogs for 2009 — we'll see which ones I'm still reading in 2010.

New blogs for 2009

1. Grognardia – Talks about roleplaying games (the paper pencil and dice kind) within the context of reviving "classic" RPG gaming, like early versions of D&D. Strangely compelling, assuming you are still or ever have played roleplaying games.
2. Homegrown Evolution – Authors of The Urban Homestead, this blog is (mostly) about how to live more sustainably in an urban environment. There is much discussion of chickens.
3. Brazen Careerist – Blogs about life & business are usually dull and almost always say safe things that sound like things you should say. Penelope Trunk is not dull and not safe.
4. AASCII – Jason Scott runs Textfiles.com (recording the history of BBSs) and has interesting things to say about computer history, social media online, and the preservation thereof.
5. SFist – Local San Francisco news and links. This is much a sign of my discontent with the San Francisco Chronicle as anything else.