Conánn FitzPatrick

A bit sick in explorer but looking spiffy enough for in Firefox, Safari and Opera.

Small fixes to come in the galleries and then down to work patching for bugs in IE6 and IE7 earlier browsers will recieve un-styled XHTML

Blogs have their own category this year in Time Magazines 50 Coolest Websites; this is big news for people who have been evangelizing blogs for that past few years. Blogs have changed the way I use the Internet. Few years ago I started my day with various news websites, CNN, MSNBC, Time and BBC, but now I find myself firing up Bloglines or Rojo first thing and seeing what other people are writing about the things that interest me.
I still go to the news pages everyday but there is something personal about the blog format that I like. Generally the good ones are written by one person, or only a few and it does not take long to get a feel for the writing style or personality of the author. The perception of personality gives the story far more weight then a story written by a journalist for a big news network.
Maybe it its just that I am getting older and more cynical but news networks have lost much of their credibility in recent years. It often takes reading the same story from different sources from a few different countries to get a feeling for the true happenings. When reading a blog though the authors credibility is not so much in question as for the most part they are writing about something they are genuinely interested in and write from their own perspective rather then they perspective of their sponsors.
What I found striking about the Time list is how few news or politics orientated blogs made it on the list, the blogs that are on there are all great blogs some of which I had never seen before Post Secret being the best.