blogs, blogs everywhere

[cluebyfour]

I moved to Google Reader some months ago for all of my RSS needs.  I had become increasingly annoyed by the fragility of LJ's aggregator; the slightest formatting anomaly in an RSS entry could cause my entire friends page to puke, and it had become cluttered to the point that I would often miss a friend's journal entry while scrolling through 37 Slashdot postings.  Moving the feeds to a separate reader cleaned things up considerably, and Google's implementation is the slickest and most robust I've seen.

I don't read a lot of feeds-and I can barely keep up with the ones I have now-but I'll share what I read regularly:

• The Agitator
  FOXnews.com commentator and former Cato policy analyst Radley Balko's blog, mostly focusing on individual rights and government abuse of power.  He has been one of the leading media crusaders on the abortion of justice that is the Cory Maye case.
  
• Autoblog
  All car news, all the time.  Daily postings on the automotive industry and car shows, plus mods, conversions, tech gadgets and other cool stuff.  Its sister blog, Autoblog Green, focuses on hybrid, electric and alternative-fuel vehicles and technologies.
  
• Coyote Blog
  Blog of a small business owner with a free-market perspective.  He's also a novelist.
  
• Ideas
  David Friedman's blog.  Friedman is a professor at Santa Clara University and the son of Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman.  He's also a novelist and the author of The Machinery of Freedom, one of the most influential books of the anarcho-capitalist movement.
  
• The LawDog Files
  If you don't think police work can be funny, you haven't read LawDog.  Riotous stories from a Texas sheriff deputy's beat that COPS would never cover.
  
• Marginal Revolution
  Libertarian economics blog written by George Mason University economists Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabarrok.  Very accessible to non-economists, although it occasionally makes my head explode.
  
• My Boring Ass Life
  Kevin Smith's blog.  A no-brainer for Smith fans, but even if you're not a fan, I recommend his series of posts on his friend and frequent film star Jason Mewes' long road to sobriety (start here-unfortunately they're not tagged so you'll have to dig through the archives a bit to read them all).
  
• The Picket Line
  Great blog about tax resistance.  Not protest-not illegal tax evasion-but one person's experience with reducing his income to the point that he pays no Federal income tax, without having to live out of his car or eat from a Dumpster behind McDonald's.
  
• PostSecret
  Probably needs no introduction for most of you, although I think it's lost a bit of its initial allure now that it's gone Big Time.  I predict it will not be long before someone turns up in a car trunk somewhere and a PostSecret submission is blamed in the media.
  
• Q and O
  A "neolibertarian" blog, neolibertarianism being defined (as best as I can tell) as traditional conservatism, but they'll let the homos and potheads have their fun.  While it's a bit too right-leaning at times for my taste, Q and O still provides good insight into a variety of political, economic and social issues.
  
• Russ Nelson
  Austrian-school economist, engineer, open-source software advocate and Quaker.  This was the first libertarian blog I added to my LJ friends list.
  
• Slashdot
  News for nerds, stuff that matters.  Still mostly relevant after nine years.  Its gradual editorial slide to the left is annoying; once upon a time it stuck to the actual news and left the partisan spin to the comments section.  But for one-stop nerd news it's hard to beat.  I have a five-digit user ID which makes me slightly l33t.
  
• Snopes
  My first (OK, only) line of defense against e-mail hoaxes, chain letters, urban legends and mass-induced stupidity.
  
• SOB: Scion of Backronymics
  Friend and fellow Coloradoan Chad Perrin's blog, focusing on programming, open-source software advocacy, intellectual property issues, politics, the occasional cultural bit and anything else Chad thinks he can piss people off about.  He is also apotheon on LJ but no longer hangs out there.
  
• Watashi to Tokyo
  My most recent addition, and one of the most interesting: an insider's guide to Tokyo (and Japanese arts and culture), written by a native in mostly excellent English.

Feel free to comment with your own interesting finds in the blogosphere.