Following on from my earlier discussion of blogs and what function they serve in media education, I’ve been revisiting a couple of my own favourite blogs and seeing how they fit into the blog landscape.

Kottke.org was founded in 1998 by Jason Kottke, an American web developer and writer who was an early adopter of many of the web’s nascent technologies, including blogging. I’ve been reading the site since around 2004 or so, when I was reading a lot of technology writers like Daring Fireball and others who would link to Kottke’s posts with unceasing regularity.

Its primary editor is Jason Kottke himself, and the site is officially “authored” by him, though there have been times when guest editors like Tim Carmody, Sarah Pavis or Adam Lisagor took over for days or weeks at a time while Kottke was on holiday or taking a break. The use of guest editors has ensured that at no point over the site’s 19-year lifespan has there been a significant dip in the amount of content being posted to the site.

In terms of content, kottke.org is simply an aggregation of interesting links from around the web, mostly under the topics of technology, arts and culture (and particularly where these topics intersect). Each post typically takes the form of a quote or embedded image/video at the top, followed by a paragraph or two of written commentary providing context and opinion. In this sense it is a typical “filter blog”, and indeed helped popularise that format in the blogging space.

Since 2005, writing for kottke.org has been Kottke’s full time job. He is an extremely prolific writer, with between one and ten new posts going up on the site every single day, and it is for this reason that his site has remained popular since its founding. No more than a day goes by without new content being added to the site, so readers can continually come back and find something new and interesting to read.

Kottke has a long track record of drawing attention to prominent artists, technologies, services and products long before they become popular in the wider world. There was a time when Kottke was among the web’s most influential figures, particularly in technology and culture circles, and his posts spread far and wide across the internet as bloggers added their own thoughts on the topics he would write about. This is one of the main reasons I enjoy reading kottke.org and still read it today: feeling connected to the newest and best things happening in the worlds of technology and culture.