Blogsploration

Please excuse the cheesy title for this post. I just couldn't resist. You see, we have a running office joke about a consultant we are working with who loves to make up "Brangelina" kinds of words. My favorite, which she used the other day during a meeting, and which I was obliged to immediately text to my coworkers back at the office, is "serendestiny." It's utterly ridiculous, but we're paying her a lot of money, so I guess the joke is on us. Anyway, back to the point of "blogsploration" which is that I recently discovered the joys of the RSS feed and the Google reader. I love the convenience of having updates from all of the sites and blogs I can never remember to visit delivered to one neat little inbox. I know that I'm the last one in the world to find out about this, and I know there are other readers out there besides Google which may have better features, but since I'm constantly using Gmail, Google docs, Google apps, etc., it's just easier. I am, however, starting to worry that Google might be Big Brother, and that they are staging a ground-up campaign for world domination. At a recent meeting I attended where some Google big shot was speaking, he said that at Google, "We see failure as just more data." This, of course, prompted a skit by my coworkers in which the Google executives were all automaton robots, and as one of their hands is cut off, leaving a tangled mess of sparking wires, he just keeps working while repeating, "More data, more data." Again, back to the topic I am hopelessley trying to write about: blogs and sites I recently found and love. So yesterday, I found two great, and totally disparate blogs to add to my RSS feed. The first is A Cup Of Jo by Joanna Goddard. As her blog description says, she posts mainly about art, photography, fashion, design, bikes, and the people she loves. It's basically just a light, fun blog, and almost all of her posts make me say, "Hmm, I'm glad I saw that!" She does have a lot of links without a real hint as to what you are heading for, so it's a lot of clicking, but it's ususally worth that minimal effort. The other is American Heritage Magazine's blog (and website in general). It's all about American History, which is something I didn't get to take at all in college, so I always feel like I am completely lacking in my understanding of it. The blog is rarely updated, and there is more information in the articles, but it is all interesting, and I feel like I am learning something that you wouldn't learn in your average high school history class. Sometimes the posts feature debates by readers, which are obviously less credible in their historical accuracy, but are enthralling none the less. So I'll add these two to my list for now, and see if they win the blogroll Survivor that will inevitably begin as my reader gets packed and I am forced to kick someone off the island for fear that I'll go into information overload.