Blogging was an exciting new thing in their heyday.

Not because it was an SEO chumbox Google-arbitrage revenue generation opportunity, not because it was a wormhole for VC funding, and certainly not because it was going to be The Next Big Thing (OK, well some people definitely thought that.)

No. Blogging was exciting because broadcasting and disseminating your writing had long been expensive and laborious. And then suddenly it wasn't.

Suddenly, it was easy and it was free, and because it was easy and free, that meant more people thought it might be a good idea to write and share their thoughts when they had no reason to before. The barriers to publishing a 10,000 word collection on television branding identity or the design of bus routes came down exponentially.

I recall this era like it should be a moment I devoured, but truthfully, I'm a late adopter at best. I first got online in 2007. I had a Twitter account by 2010. I had my first blog around then. The first iPad, tech news websites, forums (!!!), the Arab Spring, John Key's triumph, and miniscule ADSL data caps were my introduction to the internet. By the time my brain grew to comprehend anything more, tweets had taken over the space once occupied by blog posts.

This didn't stop me from consuming the copious volumes of blog material that were out there though. Google made that part of the equation simple. As a noob, reading these were a seeming goldmine of information. And this was well before the widespread linkrot of older websites, domain hijacking attempts, and plain garbage infiltrating search engines.

I can trace many of my interests and hobbies back to blog posts and blog authors who dedicated their time to sharing, writing, and journaling through their niches. When I tell people the Internet has shaped me through my upbringing likely more than any other person or thing, a big part of that was the blogs online.

Below is an incomplete list of my favourite blogs from past and present. Some of from surfing the internet 15 years ago, while some others are from just this year. Sadly, many are only accessible courtesy of the Wayback Machine due to the shitfuckeried situation that is the preservation of websites.

Cool blogs in no particular order

Minimally Minimal - Andrew Kim started this blog about product design when he was a student at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena. As one person wrote, his posts about design culture and attention to detail were "contagious". Kim has since worked at Apple, Microsoft, Tesla, and Ford. The excellent photography was also a great reason for being here.

Braun SK55
Coffee Time: Plastic leather
Toyota Doko
Apple iSight

Human Transit - A classic for urbanist and train line weirdos. This is Jarrett Walker's influential blog about public transit planning. As a blogger with a PhD in English literature, Walker has an excellent way with prose. He's perhaps the only person with published articles in both peer-reviewed transportation journals and also Shakespeare Quarterly.

People Who Love War Hate Cities
Postcard: Auckland
The Problem of School Transportation 

Brand New - A very simple premise. 1. Companies change logos all the time; 2. People have Many Opinions when that happens. Brand New posts are about new logos and new visual branding identities. As a kid, that was something very fun to look at for me. It's since been paywalled because posting logos is actually valuable! (and perhaps the designer audience can afford paying for websites)

Infinite Loop - New Logos for TVNZ done In-house
Down this Way - New Logo and Identity for The Basement by Studio Alexander
Hash it Out - New Logo and Identity for Slack by Pentagram and In-house
Tail You Win, Head You Lose - New Logo, Identity, and Livery for Qantas by Houston Group

Dan News - Bloopers, promos, marketing campaigns and all the other interesting tidbits which make up the aura around television news. Former TV3 employee Dan Lake, who I learnt recently learned only lived in an apartment a few doors down until recently, maintains an excellent archive of the comings and goings stretching back over 10 years. A great YouTube channel too!

Daring Fireball - John Gruber's opinionated Apple-focused blog that became essential reading for anyone interested in Apple, design, and technology commentary. I enjoy his linking style and his feuds with other tech writers.

15 Years Later: ‘Very Insightful and Not Negative’
Walter Isaacson’s ‘Steve Jobs’
Something Is Rotten in the State of Cupertino

Public Address - This is cheating somewhat because this is really multiple blogs on one domain, but the PA archives remain an excellent chronicle of political life through the noughties and early-2010s. If you've spent any amount of time researching NZ political debates of 2000s-era yore, a PA post has undoubtedly presented itself at some point.

Techdirt - Mike Masnick has valiantly blogged about the intersection of technology, policy, and law for nearly 3 decades now. This is usually important because what goes under US law, when it comes to throny internet issues such as copyright law, pretty much goes everywhere else in the world. Techdirt remains one of my first ports of call when it comes to First Amendment and free speech issues, copyright, censorship and Big Tech coverage.

Greater Auckland (née Transportblog) - Anyone who knows me will know why this one is on the list. To surmise, Auckland's very, very lucky to have a passionate group of people working for free on the transport advocacy train. Have a burning question about public transport or active mode history in Auckland? It's probably answered somewhere here.

Congestion Free Network 2
Light Rail: How we got here
The Pros and Cons of past CRL proposal

Idents.tv - One thing that fascinated me as a kid was idents. What are idents? They're those seconds of channel branding you see on TV channels in between programmes. Most prolific in the UK, where they also have live continuity announcers, these always were a curiosity for me. So what better than a blog about idents. TV Forum was another place I enjoyed being around.

NewscastStudio - If you can blog about TV idents, why not news studios?

3rd Level NZ - An interesting blog I came across recently which canvasses attempts to start up a third major domestic competitor and regional competitors to Air New Zealand. Stumbled upon it after listening to the ex-boss of Kiwi International Airlines speak vicariously on Morning Report in response to the big hubbub over domestic airfares a month or two ago.

The Wrong Side Of My Car - Barely indexed by Google, but an urbanist blog about Auckland by @roelandsch that I quite like. It's a one-writer affair and so it's no replacement for the mighty Transportblog, but the posts are well written, well articulated, and plain interesting. From what I've read, Roeland has actually lived in the European oasis that urbanist YouTubers love to talk about ad nauseum. With that perspective, his takes on Hobson/Nelson Street, cycleways, and Auckland urbanism issues are informed and articulate - even if often critical.

The case for and against Skypath
Apartment living: disadvantages only
The scale of Auckland

Simon Willison’s Weblog - I've come across his blog a few times over the past decade, but only more recently has it become a must-read for me. AI hype is dumb and stupid, but ignoring that LLMs are a new technology is also silly. Willison offers a type of sceptical optimism - which alongside Gary Marcus' newsletter - helps me understand how much I'm reading about the newfangled thing is garbage.

MIC Gadget - At the turn of the 2010s, China occupied a strange place in the culture. The Olympics had just happened, a tinge of Western optimism about the government was still a thing, while the country itself had the brand for being the world's knockoff factory - despite also rapidly gaining the skills for being the best factory in the world. MIC Gadget was a gadget blog around this time which canvassed the weird and the wonderful in the tech industry, but also the massive scalping industry that developed around Apple products in particular.

Beijing Apple Store Closed Due To Scalpers Reselling iPhone 4
iPhone 4 Dummy Costs No More Than $100 USD

Throng - A fun time in the 2000s and early-2010s obsessing over the then-ascendant television industry. MediaWorks worth $700m, Telecom launches TiVo -- as a sample of the headlines of the time. An introduction to that world for me as a kid, in some ways. One thing I appreciated at the time was the head-to-head story line-up comparison between TVNZ and TV3 6pm bulletins. Was always fascinating to me how identical and/or different they could be at times.

AKT - A progenitor in some ways of Transportblog and GA, the Auckland Trains blog did a great job at cataloguing transit and urban design developments in the late and early 2010s. A shame the Wordpress directory was never archived properly.

Photos: Auckland Rail As It Was
2011: The Year People Found PT
Report Lists RWC Transport Lessons

Melbourne On Transit - Many transit blogs can get very high-level very quickly. Broadly speaking, I think this is bad. e.g. Pontificating about how train = good and cool(!) gets old real quick if you don't know how stop spacing or frequency works. This one is very much the opposite of that. Melbourne on Transit covers everything from service changes and infrastructure projects to transport policy decisions, but with a very well-grounded sense of what's the next feasible actionable step in any particular context. Transport Sydney is also a good blog across the ditch, but infrequently updated.

UN 181: How Auckland is beating Melbourne on buses
Sydney versus Melbourne - Who really has the better transport?