Daily Routines

Daily Routines is a blog that publishes descriptions of the daily routines of "writers, artists, and other interesting people."  The blog is user-driven--readers who stumble across a book excerpt or newspaper/magazine/online article detailing the routine of an interesting person submit the link to the blog's editors, who publish the routine--usually as an excerpt--and a link to the full article.  Updates are sporadic, but usually interesting.  Past routines include that of the novelist Haruki Murakami, the mathematician Paul Erdos, the poet Emily Dickinson, the writer Thomas Friedman, and President Barack Obama.  DR is absolutely one of my favorite blogs on the Internet.

The Big Picture

The Boston Globe's Alan Taylor runs a great photo blog called The Big Picture, which is published on Boston.com, the newspaper's Internet gateway.  The blog features a new photo essay every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.  Taylor picks the theme of each essay, usually choosing something relevant to recent news and events.  He scours the photowires for the best shots, and then publishes them in high resolution.  Unlike daily photo blogs which publish one photo per page, TBP publishes each essay (which usually includes between 25 and 40 photographs) as one long, vertically-scrollable web page.  In my opinion, TBP has been the web's best photo blog for a long time, so I am happy that it has recently gained an enormous following and that it was recently nominated for a Weblog Award.

NPR Song of the Day

This blog combines two of my favorite things: music and NPR.  The editors of NPR's Song of the Day do a great job keeping the music new and interesting while also maintaining a commitment to talented muscians and top-notch audio quality.  Two complaints, though: the site's pop-up media player is cumbersome, and it's much too hard to steal download the mp3 files.

It Might Be Dangerous... You Go First

Major League Baseball General Managers are among the most secretive, secluded people in all of professional sports.  While the MLB trade rumor mill is constantly active, the men (and yes, they are all men) who actually make personnel decisions rarely offer any insight into their thoughts or plans.

San Diego Padres GM Kevin Towers is the exception.  He has allowed his assistant, Paul DePodesta (of Moneyball fame), to blog about the team's personnel decisions.  On It Might Be Dangerous...You Go First, DePodesta details the braintrust's thinking behind trades, contract extensions, free agents, draft strategy, etc.  DePodesta's blog is unique in that it's the first time that the management of a professional sports team has communicated with the team's fans without going through the media.  This direct, 1-on-1 communication could prove revolutionary (by, perhaps, fostering interest in the team and widening the team's fanbase) or, as the blog's title suggests, dangerous (by providing information that could help their opponents).

flickr's Geotagging Milestone

Photo-sharing website flickr recently reached a milestone. Over the weekend, the amount of the site's photos that has been geotagged passed the 100,000,000 mark. This is an opportunity to discuss geotagging.

Geotagging is a feature that flickr developed almost three years ago. Like flickr's text tags, geotags aid other users in finding photos of a specific kind; geotags allow users to find photos taken at a particular place. Unlike conventional tags, however, geotags are not text-based. Instead, users can use a map app similar to Google Maps to pinpoint exactly where one of their uploaded photos was taken. The popularity of geotagging (as the post indicates, almost 3.5% of flickr's three billion photos have been geotagged) actually affected the digital camera industry. Nikon recently released a camera attachment that automatically inserts geotag data into a photograph's metadata (like EXIF and IPTC).

Overseas Development Institute

The London-based Overseas Development Institute is among the world's leading international development think tanks. It's mission, to "inspire and inform policy and practice which lead to the reduction of poverty, the alleviation of suffering, and the achievement of sustainable livelihoods in developing countries," is accomplished through a three-part approach: conducting research, making practical policy recommendations, and spreading news and ideas. The methods of the third part have evolved over the years, from monthly publications in newspapers and industry journals to what is now a daily link to the general public through a weblog. While there is much to discuss regarding the ODI homepage, I'd like to focus on the ODI blog.

The blog is unique in that it does not require a subscription to an expensive industry journal (the Journal of International Development, for example); everyone with internet access can read that which the men and women at ODI have to say. As such, the writers have been forced to tailor their pieces to a new audience--an audience that may not be formally educated in relevant areas and an audience that may have an interest in the topics different from the professional interest that most journal-subscribers and industry workers possess. The blog also allows for other changes, like the inclusion of a blogroll (which introduces readers to blogs from groups like the Center for Global Development, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the Alertnet from Reuters), access to RSS feeds and podcasts, and the ability to book a spot at upcoming events. The blog does, however, feature some dead links--an unfortunate bit that would never happen in ODI's journal articles of old.

PA Arts Experience

The PA Arts Experience is "a non-profit arts organization promoting the scenic river valleys of southeastern Pennsylvania as a destination for arts-minded tourists and patrons."  The group promotes the PAE Artist Trail, a geographic corridor that unites the works and events of the artists of southeastern PA.  The PAE website features a landing page (a banner image featuring minor text and a beautiful photograph), a navigation bar along the top of the entire website, and links to external sites, like lancasterartshotel.com.  I found the aesthetics to be pleasing and the site organization to be logical and intuitive.

Dealzmodo

Gizmodo is a blog focused on consumer electronics. Almost daily, the blog's writers use one post to publish the day's best deals. The post usually features a picture at the top depicting some of the best deals to be found in the post. Following the banner is a dense list of product names, marked-down prices, original prices, and links to the vendor offering the deal. Because the Gizmodo writers scour most (if not all) of the other popular websites that feature daily gadget deals, this daily post, dubbed "Gadget Deals of the Day," acts as an aggregator for all of the best deals on the web.