Blogs of Note

» see blogsofnote.blogspot.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

The first entry in the archive is dated 22 January 2001 and points at a blog called Love, the wife. Two more went up the same morning, an hour apart, with no explanation attached to any of them. Blogger had been running about a year and a half at that point and was still a handful of people at Pyra Labs, and the list was a way of pointing at the better corners of a service that was otherwise strangers writing into the dark.

It kept going for twelve years. Google bought Pyra in February 2003 and the feature came along with the company, eventually moving onto its own blogspot address and settling into a rhythm of a few picks a week. Being chosen was a genuine event if you were the one chosen. A blog with forty readers would wake up to several thousand, the comment thread would fill with people saying hello from the Blogs of Note list, and a few of those visitors stayed. The Blogger team announced the thousandth entry in April 2007.

Nobody was ever told how the picks were made. There was no vote and no visible submission queue, just somebody at Blogger reading and deciding, which is why the list ran heavily toward craft blogs and photography and people writing carefully about small things. The last one, a home and decorating blog called i suwannee, went up on 22 August 2012. After that the picks simply stopped.

~ the dossier ~

~ what one line was worth ~

What this feature was doing is hard to explain to anyone who arrived after 2010. In 2003 there was no feed of recommendations and no follower count telling you a blog was worth reading before you read it. Discovery ran on blogrolls and on a few hand-kept lists like this one. A link from Blogger was a link from the house, and for most people it was the only one they were ever going to get.

From Turkey the list was readable and not much else. It ran in English, the blogs on it were mostly American, and you reached it by going to blogger.com's own front page rather than by following anybody you knew. The Turkish blog scene of those years sat on its own hosts and inside its own forums, and being noted by Blogger moved no traffic at all across that gap.

~ the handover ~

Five months after the last pick, on 22 January 2013, one more post appeared. "We're putting our Blogs of Note blog in archive mode now, so for the latest updates from the Blogger team please follow us on Google+ (which of course include a dose of notable blogs!)" That was the twelfth anniversary of the first entry, to the day, which appears to have been a coincidence and which nobody noticed at the time.

Google+ closed its consumer doors on 2 April 2019, and whatever notable blogs were posted there went with it. The forwarding address outlived the thing it replaced by six years and then died too.

~ what is still there ~

blogsofnote.blogspot.com answers today. The theme is a later Blogger template rather than the one it wore in 2004, the posts are all present, and the feed still returns JSON if you ask it for the oldest entry. Each post is a title and a link and almost nothing else, which was the format from the first day and never changed.

A large share of the addresses it points at are gone now. The list outlasted most of what was on it.

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