I don’t keep a blogroll here for various reasons–lack of space, not wishing to alienate bloggers who don’t make my list (though I can’t imagine anyone would care too much), not wanting to have to maintain the thing as I add and drop blogs. I don’t make my Bloglines subs public because I only use Bloglines as a distant second choice to my usual feed reader, the excellent NetNewsWire Light, a desktop client for the Macintosh. My Bloglines subs don’t get updated very often.

Besides, I figure you can tell which blogs I am really influenced by through my links–if I link to it, you know I find it particularly worthwhile and interesting, which is something you can’t really tell just from a list.

Walt Crawford posted recently on his Bloglines subscription list in Blogs I read, if you care. You can see them here

That’s reasonably interesting; I thought I read a lot of library blogs, but I ain’t got nothing on Walt. But more interesting to me was his shorter list of non-library blogs. And, since I started this post over the weekend, Lorcan Dempsey has a post, Self-aggrandRSSment on some of the non-library blogs he’s been reading lately.

So I thought I’d post a brief list of my some favorite non-library blogs; I don’t link to them much, so I doubt I’d get around to mentioning them otherwise.

  • 43Folders: Merlin Mann’s blog (and del.icio.us linkblog and podcasts and wiki and Google group and discussion board (!)) on Getting Things Done, lifehacks, Macintosh, and general good-natured geekiness. Probably my favorite blog of 2005.
  • 456 Berea St.: Swedish web designer Roger Johansson’s blog on web design and development. Lots of action in the comments, with good discussion about design, web standards, and the like. If you want to know what professional web designers are discussing, this is a good one.
  • fade theory: a blog about books, reading, and culture from an anonymous female “theorist.” I have just started reading this one, and particularly enjoyed her post interlibrary woes about marked-up books arriving on ILL.
  • Inside Higher Ed. and Chronicle of Higher Ed. (subscription only): keeping tabs on academe in general
  • Many-to-Many: “a group weblog on social software.” This seemed more vital when Clay Shirky was posting more often (anyone know where he went?), but the rest of the group is still very good.
  • Michael Bérubé Online: I have been a fan of Bérubé’s writing on academe for a long time, and only relatively recently found his blog. He writes about academe, politics, hockey, culture, and his family.
  • O’Reilly Radar: a good place to keep up on general web and technology stuff.
  • News from Stephen’s Web by Stephen Downes: a lot of this has to do with teaching and pedagogy–I skim much of it, but Stephen links to a large number of readings almost every day on technology and higher education.
  • The Valve: another new one (to me, that is), The Valve is a literary site sponsored by the Association of Literary Scholars and Critics (so that should give you an idea of what kind of “literary” talk we’re talkin’ about here). I have been following their “book event” around Graphs, Maps, Trees, a book of literary history and theory by Franco Moretti. Interesting stuff, and a book I would have never read if it weren’t for this blog and their event.
  • Waxy links: my favorite place for web zeitgeisty/meme-de-jour stuff.
  • Wired Campus Blog: no, not that Wired; this is a blog from the Chronicle of Higher Ed. on education-technology news. Unlike the main Chronicle page, this is freely available (though they do link back to the pay site frequently).
  • You’re It: a blog on tagging.

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