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You have arrived at the web home of Noah Brier. This is mostly an archive of over a decade of blogging and other writing. You can read more about me or get in touch. If you want more recent writing of mine, most of that is at my BrXnd marketing x AI newsletter and Why Is This Interesting?, a daily email for the intellectually omnivorous.

December, 2009

Best New Blogs of 09

Noah Brier's top new blogs of 2009, including Snarkmarket, Tumblr, New Math, Cheap Talk, and The Awl.

Continuing the year-end festivities, here are my top new blogs of 2009. I'm defining "new" here by whether the site was in my reading repertoire before this year. Anyway, here they are in no specific order:

  1. Snarkmarket: This one couldn't be easier. Over the year I've gotten to know Robin, one of the site's three writers, and they've managed to churn out one interesting post after another. For whatever it's worth, I linked to these guys quite a few times times: New Liberal Arts (Making Things and Iteration, Everything I Know About Life I Learned from My Search Engine (Are People Getting Better at Search?, The Starbucks API (Starbucks API), Technologies Don't Transform. Societies Do. (Socialness and the Inevitability of Technology) and Spaces Between Words, Spaces Between Souls (The Impact of Space). (Also, as a bonus link, Robin wrote a book called Annabel Scheme via Kickstarter.)
  2. Tumblr: A bit of a cop-out, but Tumblr became one giant blog I follow this year. A few of my favorites: rafer, msg, peterfeld, adamiss, The Daily Bunch, soupsoup, Jay Parkinson, Mike Hudack and cjn. (I'm heyitsnoah.tumblr.com if you're so inclined.)
  3. New Math and Learn Something New Every Day: I group these together because they feel like part of the same family (the elder statesman of the family would be Indexed. It's always a treat to see an image from either of these sites turn up in my feeds.
  4. Cheap Talk and ThinkMarkets: I tend to group these two together because a) they're both about economics and b) they're both hosted on Wordpress with minimal designs. Anyway, throughout the year both sites helped fill my fix for economics information, especially lighter fare "economics of real life" type stuff (like this Cheap Talk post on Ashton Kutcher's Twitter follower strategy).
  5. The Awl: This will make everyone's list (it's already started). To be honest I wasn't sure about it. I read it, and it was very good, but there were quite a few posts I skipped (I tend to judge these things on how much of a "must-read" something is). Then they did their End of the 00s roundups and they were generally outstanding and there was no longer a question for me.
  6. NYTPicker: My buddy Dave first pointed me to NYTPicker and I've been reading it ever since. For those that haven't checked it out, it's an insider view of the New York Times. Makes me wish more industries/companies had something equivalent, as reading entries always make me feel like I know something I shouldn't (which is fun).
  7. The Browser is some sort of weird aggregator. I'm not sure where the links come from (except that they pull links roundups from lots of top economics bloggers) and, to be honest, I don't care as long as the great links keep flowing.

I'm sure there are more, but these are the ones that stand out as hitting my radar in the last twelve months. Hope you find some new reading.

December 31, 2009
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Noah Brier | Thanks for reading. | Don't fake the funk on a nasty dunk.