Serendipity35

Add another milestone to the history of blogging. I read "Finding the 'Ultimate Blogs': An interview with Sarah Boxer" posted by Kelly Heyboer on the Jersey Blogs site last week.

Sarah Boxer has put together an anthology of the best blog writing. She admits the term ultimate is:

"kind of tongue in cheek. (I guess I needed an emoticon to cue people how to read that word.) There are no ultimate blogs, of course. The blogosphere is an endless stream of constantly changing material.

I went through hundreds of blogs, following recommendations, links, contests, and the "favorites" lists of bloggers I like. I looked for variety in terms of subject matter, use of language, age group, geography, and type (there are a couple of poetry blogs, a few cartoon blogs and one photo blog in the book).

The blogs I ultimately chose are the ones that I thought were exceptionally well written, bloggy in tone, and -- most basically -- would work in a book."

The former New York Times reporter is not a blogger herself, so she created this traditional book of paper about digital writing.

Ultimate Blogs: Masterwords from the Wild Web is made up of posts from 27 blogs. Some blogs are pretty well known (Go Fug Yourself ,The Smoking Gun) others are not - though I suspect their ht counters will surge this month.

• An American-abroad blog How to Learn Swedish in 1000 Difficult Lessons,
• military blog Midnight in Iraq
• classical music blog The Rest is Noise.

Boxer was asked

Q: Did you have a favorite blogger? Were you surprised by what you selected for the anthology?
A: I love all of them actually. The ones that really stick in my mind are the ones I think of as alter-ego blogs or character blogs: AngryBlackBitch, Eurotrash, El Guapo.

I also love the cartoon blogs Micrographica and Get Your War On. I find I Blame the Patriarchy hilarious. I can't pick. They're all great.

There are tons of fabulous storytellers in there: There's an Iraqi blogger who tells an amazing tale about a t-shirt. There's an American Marine interviewing some Iraqi kids. There's an American living in Sweden who is a master of short anecdotes. A music blogger tells the story, with the help of Mozart and Wagner, of how applause between musical movements came to be frowned on.

Another blogger retells the story of the Iliad and Odyssey from the point of view of one of Odysseus's sidekicks.

I was surprised that so few of the bloggers in the book turned out to be political bloggers. I have only two -- Rootless Cosmopolitan and Matthew Yglesias. It is incredibly hard to find any political blogs that don't rely heavily on links and that don't go stale the day after they're written.

Do you use blogging in your classes? I know that there are courses taught at the college level on blogging. I wouldn't say that this anthology is appropriate as a textbook, but the sites and some of the examples might well be used to show the styles & genres that are developing in blogging. Did you know that there are cartoon blogs? (Personally, I like indexed.) Could you use under odysseus in your classics unit or pair it up with Rosencrantz and Guilderstern Are Dead to talk about changing the point of view in a story?

Will we see a time when there will be Best American Blog Posts (though "American" may not work for the Net) as we now have the Best American Poetry or Best American Stories et al?