Just as nobody anticipated the levees breaking in New Orleans, according to President Bush, I don't think anybody anticipated the overwhelming response I would get when I asked the members of my very extensive and eclectic blogroll to send me links to their best posts of the year. Not even Condoleeza Rice could have predicted the shock and awe you will feel at the sheer magnitude of the talent out there, of which this is just a small sampling. These posts were not chosen by a panel of experts or TV viewers, but by the bloggers themselves as each blog's best work of 2007. There are posts on politics by liberals, conservatives and moderates, posts on movies, music, television, books, economics, health care, science, sports, religion and history, personal stories and slices of life, poetry, prose, pictures and video. Some are very funny, some are quite serious, some will make you angry and some will make you say "Huh?" Go ahead and click on a link that sounds intriguing or from a blog you haven't read before or check in with an old favorite.

Labels: Best of the Year, blogging

Labels: blogging, busy

Pavlov's Blog
If you ever want an illustration of the psychological phenomenon known as conditioned reflex, write a disdainful article about blogs and get it into print. Our talented young colleague Joe Rago did just that yesterday, and, predictably enough, he was met with howls of outrage from the herd of iconoclasts collectively known as the blogosphere.

We need to clarify one thing, though. Chris Muir's Day by Day cartoon yesterday was devoted to faulting Rago's piece for about the most trivial error imaginable: a missing period at the end of a paragraph. Once that mistake was corrected online, Muir updated his cartoon (quoting verbatim): "Note: WSJ editurz have korrected punshuation punctuashion the period thing 10amEST.-Ed." Blogger Glenn Reynolds sneered, "I notice that Rago has fixed the typo, . . . after just a few hours, a speed that is only a bit slower than the average blogger."

Actually, it was your humble columnist (who also serves as editor of this Web site) who fixed this typo. What's more, we went back and checked, and it turns out that we, not Rago, were responsible for the typo in the first place. The period was there in the print edition, and apparently we deleted it through an errant keystroke while we were preparing the article for online posting.

You can still blame the MSM, though. After all, even though what we do has some resemblance to blogging, we are part of the mighty Wall Street Journal. (link)

Labels: blogging, MSM

Labels: basketball, blogging, college sports, football, life, NFL