Too Much of a Good Thing

Dare I suggest that the whole concept of a 100 Blogs We Love list is fundamentally misguided. Nobody could love 100 regularly updated blogs, in the sense of following them religiously -- you'd run out of time and never get anything done. There's a big set of blogs that I'm very glad exist because now and again the situation arises when I want to see someone with something smart or witty to say on Subject X and I know that blogs A, B, and C are out there to scratch that itch. But the number of blogs I genuinely love needs to stay relatively small.

At this rate, you might as well just put together a list of 1,000 movies. Oh, wait.

Comments

Apparently, your argument convinced ABC as "this page can not be found."

Posted by Armando | June 27, 2007 3:36 PM

Your current antipathy to lists seems fundamentally misguided to me.

-----

Also, with blogs, RSS readers make it easy to have a high number of blogs that one pays some small amount of attention to.

For example, I don't usually read Kriston's blog, but I subscribe in my RSS reader, occasionally check the "not all that interested" category I've got his blog ghettoized into, and sometimes notice something that piques my interest enough to actually go look at his stuff in my browser.

And tangentially, I frankly don't understand how anyone survives without NewsFire. I've tried Vienna and NetNewsWire, but neither of them lets me set up a workflow to keep in touch with a high number of blogs like NewsFire does.

Posted by Petey | June 27, 2007 3:45 PM

I don't think Matt is fundamentally antipathetic to lists. I think he is annoyed by what he believes are absurdly long lists of things that belong on much shorter lists.

Posted by blah | June 27, 2007 3:49 PM

Petey,

Are you aware that human-like creatures actually survived on this earth for thousands of years without any internet access?

Posted by peep | June 27, 2007 3:51 PM

Assuming you have your facts right, how human-like could they really have been?

Posted by washerdreyer | June 27, 2007 4:01 PM

"Are you aware that human-like creatures actually survived on this earth for thousands of years without any internet access?"

I'd like to see some kind of link backing that up.

Posted by Petey | June 27, 2007 4:04 PM

I spend too much time on blogs as it is. Petey is like the nightmare scenario of where I'll be a few years down the road (if indeed he is one person and not some sort of highly sophisticated AI program devised by the John Edwards campaign).

Posted by Korha | June 27, 2007 4:22 PM

I reaffirm my call for Petey to get a blog. Or would it just end up being dedicated to responding to posts by Mr. Yglesias and Mr. Klein? On the other hand, given the immense content overlap between the two in the last couple of days, who's to say adding another blog to the mix would even be a problem? So much to think about.

Posted by Sam L. | June 27, 2007 4:40 PM

"if indeed he is one person and not some sort of highly sophisticated AI program devised by the John Edwards campaign"

"Petey" is actually an group of modestly paid young Indians working from an office park outside of Gujarat. Outsourcing allows us to achieve better blog comment coverage at a reasonable price.

We've been trying to expand geographically to employ Chinese virtual gold farmers, but we've been having trouble with the quality of their basketball commentary. They really are Yao-focused to a fault.

Posted by Petey | June 27, 2007 5:52 PM

I'm not going to search around for the list, but the title "100 Blogs *We* Love" strongly implies that more than one person's love is being spread around to the blogs in question. Just as with the 1000 movies list, a sufficiently large group of people is more than capable of loving 100 or more blogs. Not every list has to be capable of being appreciated by each and every reader in its entirety.

Posted by five toed sloth | June 27, 2007 5:54 PM

Wait, the Edwards campain is outsourcing work to India? The Hillary campaign might be interested inthat...

Posted by Al | June 27, 2007 7:44 PM

One of the things that annoys me about long lists is their lack of informational value. Top X lists serve primarily to tell you about the people making the list. For every increase in X (beyond a certain mimimum, perhaps), the value of the list decreases.

Posted by nolaboyd | June 28, 2007 8:36 AM

Wait, the Edwards campain is outsourcing work to India? The Hillary campaign might be interested inthat...

Quick, call their boiler room in the Phillipines and tell them . . .

Posted by rea | June 28, 2007 2:47 PM