The Best Blog Posts of 2008

Though I'm clearly not a fan of link whoring "best of" or "top 10" posts, I wanted to take a quick look back at the most amazing ideas and incisive commentary that exploded through my RSS reader this year. This cannot possibly be a definitive list, and I'm sure there are many more great pieces that I am missing here. While ranging widely different themes in different styles of writing, what all of these posts have in common is that they stopped me in my tracks and made my head spin, and their influence lingered for days, sometimes weeks and months. All these writers have influenced me to assimilate challenging ideas and become better at what I do - and for that, I thank you all.

  • Kris Sowersby (January) - Why Bembo Sucks
    When you mention "book design", most graphic designers immediately think of "cover design". Kris mercilessly sweeps through the ignorance, showing off the unmistakable depth of concern of a specialist talking to an audience of generalists. Of course, Bembo still remains one of my all-time favorite typefaces.
  • Zed Shaw (January) - Rails is a Ghetto
    This probably needs no explanation. Clearly, someone like Zed just ain't gonna fit in with the vapid motivations of the assholes, leeches, and hangers on to a wild trend like Rails. I think a lot of dorks misunderstood Zed's personality in this piece (and its humor) - I didn't. I've been fucked over in this industry before, and can totally relate to the emotions and motivations that might spark such a rant. Wow.
  • Dan Hill (February) - The street as platform
    Wild immersive narrative exploring what an "everyday informational street" might be - a fascinating thought experiment that's not too far away from reality.
  • Nova Spivak (April) - The Wikipedia, Knowledge Preservation and DNA
    Forget the semantic web - we can go one step further and encode collective knowledge (like Wikipedia) in our DNA. One of the most bold and provocative ideas to surface in recent months. Maybe it's crazy, but it seems entirely possible. Ideas like this are hard to ignore.
  • Les Orchard (July) - Queue everything and delight everyone
    Mmm... brainmeats. But seriously - this was a welcome serving of clarity at the end of a particularly noxious period of infrastructure masturbation and blog obsessions with the scaling problems of Twitter. The best thing about this post is that it puts the user in the front seat, and explains how the technology can and should flow from their experience.
  • Grant McCracken (July) - How to be a self-funding anthropologist
    How to see opportunity everywhere. Fascinating and somewhat inspirational.
  • Robert Cringely (July) - Inflection Point: What's the practical life span of DTV?
    It may not seem it at first, but this is huge. A sweeping, precise, and technically sound explanation of the death of television as we know it. I can't wait.
  • Anil Dash (October) - What Sarah Palin Is Saying
    A brilliant linguistic explanation and condemnation of Palin's disgusting dog whistle politics. At a time when the media and blogosphere was utterly rampaging, they refused to see Palin as anything other than an inchoate candidate, nothing worse than rustic, rambling and unarticulate. What Anil illustrated was how Palin's strategy was far more cynical, her considered vagueness playing off organized media amnesia - journalists would demand an instant response, hear her excuse and then forget the indiscretion overnight. But Palin knew that her core audience would not forget - many of her supporters were cajoled into literally believing that Obama was a terrorist sympathizer and associates with terrorists (his um, recent cabinet choice should extinguish that idea fairly sharply).
  • Kevin Kelly (October) - Evidence of a Global SuperOrganism
    Far from the "Google as Skynet" meme that seemed to be in vogue for the past couple of years, this takes more of a long view, and positions the AI far outside the scope and realm of what we could easily control or understand, which to me is far more realistic. How plausible is this scenario? Is it inspiring or just plain frightening?