One of the reasons I started this blog was that I enjoyed reading other people’s blogs. I was impressed by the Flash prowess of Sam Wan and enjoyed industry updates from Jeremy Allaire and Kevin Lynch. I noticed that often when I had a very specific technical question, I found the answer on someone’s blog.

Instead of being merely a consumer of useful tidbits, I figured that folks might be interested in my thoughts or in need of my know-how. What is every-day experience to one engineer is rare and specialized detail to another. When I kicked this thing off, I thought it would be more of a techie blog. As the “evolving ultrasaurus” tagline suggests, it is not what I thought it would be and it changes over time.

I may be an anomoly in the blogosphere, but I don’t read the so-called A-list bloggers, and I don’t strive to be one. Everyone has their own reasons to blog. For me, I like being on the W-list with other not-so-invisible bloggers.

I always felt that the internet was the inverse of mass media. Instead of a few information sources braodcast to the masses, there are a huge number of publishers. Frankly the credibility of TV news is not any better than your average web site. Even with digital cable hooked up to the TV, I’ve got way more channels on my laptop.

read more top ten reasons for a web log

In keeping a web log, I’ve noticed that good information and interesting people find me. Christian Walker called this phenomenon a reverse search engine.

I find that the more I write about topics that interest me, the less I need to to surf the web via key word searches. I still love google, but more frequently I find interesting sites through technorati and trackback.

Interesting sites I’ve found:
– Usable Design Media
– Cogworks
– Peter Lindberg

People really do make the best librarians.

read more top ten reasons for a web log

hollowcube mini-blog reader by Michael Gunn can also be found on were-here. It let’s you read recent entries of other blogs without leaving the gutter. I found the interface intuitive and easy to navigate …more info.

Greg Burch has a different approach. He includes horizontally scrolling tciker for headlines. I have to admit that it took me a second to figure out how to switch feed because the popup menu with the ‘go’ button felt so much like HTML UI that I wasn’t sure it controlled the text below. It can be a challenge when we embed rich UI in the page how to indicate what clicks will change the info on the page vs. taking you to a different page.

(via JD’s list of SWF blog widgets)

Also notable, is Joi Ito’s gutter which is a DHTML variant that provides a list of categories that expands with list of links or pictures.