Are There Any Good General-Topic Blogs?

August 26, 2008 12:08 PM

I've been doing some thinking lately about blogs. It seems that most of the really popular, successful blogs stick to one topic or another, pretty well defined (food, books, politics, celebrities, etc.). Are there any really popular or successful (in the sense of widely-read, or just good to read) blogs that are about a variety of topics, or that take the 'one person's views on a whole bunch of things' model?
posted by toomuchkatherine to Writing & Language (17 answers total)

uh, have you heard of kottke.org or boingboing?
posted by lia at 12:15 PM on August 26, 2008

Eye-rolling "It's all steampunk!" snarkery aside, boingboing is definitely not about any specific thing (though it certainly has topics that it reliably returns to, like copyleft and steampunk and transhumanism and nerdy crafts.)
posted by Tomorrowful at 12:16 PM on August 26, 2008

Oh, and there's this group thing that calls itself a "community weblog."
posted by Tomorrowful at 12:17 PM on August 26, 2008

ThePioneerWoman.com covers all kinds of things - photography, cooking, ranch life, etc.
posted by twiki at 12:18 PM on August 26, 2008

What about blogs where people write about their lives, like dooce.com?
posted by ThePinkSuperhero at 12:20 PM on August 26, 2008 [2 favorites]

Response by poster: Yes, I'm interested in successful blogs where people write about their lives, or where people write opinion about a bunch of different topics.

I consider BoingBoing to be more or less about one thing, because the vast majority of stories are similar (short 'oh wow! that's so cool/weird!' tidbits), but I see your point.
posted by toomuchkatherine at 12:30 PM on August 26, 2008

Two of my favorites for a variety of topics:

What I Learned Today
...and...
Damn Interesting
posted by 2oh1 at 12:45 PM on August 26, 2008

My favorite blog in that vein (that I learned about here) is Miss Doxie. She had a fairly long hiatus recently but is back in superb Doxie form.
posted by agatha_magatha at 1:03 PM on August 26, 2008

It's biased heavily towards economics, but Marginal Revolution covers a surprisingly broad range of topics.
posted by proj at 1:23 PM on August 26, 2008

.... And my link doesn't work unless you put 'www.' in front of it. Annoying.
posted by proj at 1:24 PM on August 26, 2008

Although it doesn't update as much as I would like (aka: continuously), Defective Yeti is all kinds of awesome.

Well, maybe not all kinds, but at least 7
posted by Lemurrhea at 1:27 PM on August 26, 2008

I don't know how 'successful' it is, but Dark Roasted Blend is definitely fun to read and covers a wide range of topics.
posted by xbonesgt at 2:01 PM on August 26, 2008 [1 favorite]

James Lileks. "The Bleat" is very wide-ranging, and extremely popular.
posted by Class Goat at 4:07 PM on August 26, 2008

I read a whole bunch of blogs where the owner just writes a post every day or so about his/her life, something in the media, or whatever is on their mind. They are very unlike BoingBoing or MeFi. I don't know if that's what you're looking for.

Probably the most popular one I read is Dad Gone Mad which, despite its title and despite my filing it in a category called "Parent Blogs", it really isn't much about parenting. Sometimes his kids and family come up. But mainly he's just funny as hell about whatever.

Well, that's the only "really popular" one I can identify.
posted by iguanapolitico at 7:17 PM on August 26, 2008

GirlHacker's Random Log is a good one. Short, varied, interesting, and long-lived (since '99!).
posted by tractorfeed at 10:15 AM on August 27, 2008

Immanent Discursivity only posts youtube videos but they are pretty diverse. Jane Dark's Sugarhigh! is also good.
posted by billtron at 10:47 PM on August 27, 2008

Response by poster: Thanks, everybody.
posted by toomuchkatherine at 8:30 AM on August 30, 2008