The Guardian Unlimited Arts Blog gives me hope for the vitality and usefulness of blogging. It takes the best attributes of the Guardian -- great writing, focused arguments, and a classy presentation -- and combines them with the best attributes of the blog -- astonishing timeliness, personal perspective, and an open forum for commentary. The contributors are not constrained in the way they might be by their bosses and editors in the process of writing articles for the Guardian proper, but their approach is still uniform and stable. Entries fall under prominent headings, as in "Art," "Film," "Music," etc. They have cover images and subheadlines. And, in general, the entries contain well-reasoned, specific arguments. Except there are notably fewer content restrictions. For example, this bit of hilarity would probably never make the print (or online) Guardian, but it is perfect blog material:

One of the things about blogs--they have those dated entries. So the short of it is, I saw a rather old bus ad today, and wasn't paying attention to the advertising world last January when this was first launched as I learned from said dated blogs, but I still think it's interesting the at&t had a whole campaign that was "blogging delivered." And then for a while, their website had no results when one searched "blog," creating condescending hoopla, as well as confused hoopla. They've since remedied the situation with this rather fluffy article.

I feel like a tool being the one to bring up Facebook, but I just can’t help laughing at the irony that the same day I start my first blog, the format on Facebook changes to the “News Feed” and “Mini-Feed” that seems to constitute a sort of forced community blog (as well as less privacy – note the new group: “Facebook is now creepy”). Twice in a day I become a part of a blog that I probably would not have been involved in if left to my own devices and desires. In looking around a little more, I just learned about the 'Notes' feature on Facebook which essentially means a blog for everyone, making the site a strange aggregation of blogs. But I can't quite decide if Facebook itself is a glorified blog, or if it's just an agent of blogging.

I've heard of a rather hilarious blog about the literary world called bookninja.com, and since taking this class, I decided to check it out. Pretty amazing. This is a quote from an August post, called "Harry Potter and the Repressed Virgin Nerds of Academia."

"A Berkeley professor called Frederick Crews did a rather gentle lampoon of literary criticism back in the Sixties called Pooh Perplex, a collection of essays purporting to be written by various academics on the subject of Winnie the Pooh. Then a few years ago he wrote a sequel, Postmodern Pooh, which included a paper on ‘The Fissured Subtext: Historical Problematics, the Absolute Cause, Transcoded Contradictions, and Late-Capitalist Metanarrative (in Pooh) ‘ by a Marxist called Carla Gulag who compares Pooh to Chairman Mao.

I don't read too many blogs other than the journal blogs that my friends keep, but there are a select few that I'll care to skim every once in a while. One of them is the San Francisco Chronicle's Culture Blog. It's a "collaborative" blog written by the Chronicle's writers, editors, columnists, and covers pretty much a wide range of topics from pop culture, to fashion, to movies and music, to sports...pretty much whatever interests the writers in their spare time. The categories are many, the frontpage lists all of them. I really like to skim this blog occasionally because, in addition to quirky and entertaining entries about Baby Superheros or political commentary, there's occasionally entries that talk about San Francisco culture and stories about going-ons in local neighborhoods, and as a San Francisco native, it's always fun to run across a blog entry that talks about, for example, my favorite hole-in-the-wall local greasy spoon establishment or the latest street fashion in the Mission District.

OK, so here is what I've dug up--

(1) Postsecret. This is a sometimes funny, sometimes kitchy, sometimes all too serious collection of secrets written on "postcards".
PostSecret
I'm not sure if it technically counts as a blog--but then, we never nailed down what exactly a blog is in the year 2006. Whatever this site technically is, it's pretty neat to scroll through--especially if the heat is shortening your attention span.

(2) Martha Stewart Stinks. Now this next site really appeals to me. It's a bit girly, I'll admit (well, a lot girly) but it's not over the top. Once again, it's not really a "serious news" outlet, but it's a lot of arts and crafts projects, nifty recipes, funny observations, and helpful tips. And the name doesn't hurt either.