Great Blogs (Part 1)

Today everyone participating in the 2010 WordCount Blogathon is writing about their favorite blogs. I follow a LOT of blogs in categories ranging from art and culture to food, media, design and freelancing; picking just 5 or 10 to feature here is a tall order. So, I’m featuring 5 favorites today, and will feature 5 additional picks each week this month. I hope that by the time June rolls around, I’ll have introduced you to at least a couple of sites you really like.

Christa in New York: Curating a Creative Life
I found Christa’s blog when I was planning my move to New York. I wrote about creative living in Washington, DC, and I thought that finding similarly-minded bloggers in NY might help me figure out what neighborhood to live in.

I found Christa’s blog and within a few minutes, realized that not only had we gone to the same college, we’d graduated the same year; plus, we were both dedicated yogis; and, of course, we both blogged about creative living. I emailed Christa right away, and we became pen pals; now that I live in NY, we’re just pal-pals.

I am so grateful for how thoughtfully Christa writes about her efforts to live an extraordinary life; lately, that includes a lot of posts about her yoga teacher training, and she does a beautiful job of evoking key yogic ideas. If you want to believe that it’s possible to lead a richly rewarding life, read this blog.

Etsy Blog
If you’re feeling blue, the eye candy on the Etsy blog promises an instant pick-me-up. The only problem is that you’re likely to want to buy stuff. Then again, if you’re buying stuff, might as well buy it from independent artists…

Kristen Taylor, aka kthread
I jumped the gun and gave Kristen a shout-out the other day, so she gets double exposure on Tastee Pudding this week. I met Kristen when she worked at PBS, and I was consulting for them.  We bonded right away over our love of farmers markets and a commitment to treating our lives as art. Kristen is a gifted photographer and cook, and her photos of food – at farmers markets, in the beautiful dishes she prepares, pushed to the side of a plate at the end of a dinner party – are things of beauty. She savors experiences like delicious morsels of food, and I’m so appreciative of how artfully she chronicles both the esoteric and mundane. If you’re in a rut, get inspired by reading through a week in Kristen’s life.

MediaShift

This is THE blog for keeping up with the daily (hourly!) changes in media; more than just a news ticker of gadget launches and business deals, MediaShift focuses on how changes in media affect people (imagine that!). Executive Editor Mark Glaser has been covering this terrain for over a decade, and he and his team of contributors provide trustworthy reporting and insightful analysis that really helps you make sense of which media developments matter most. (Full disclosure: I’m the former editor of MediaShift, and initially greenlit the site for PBS.)

The Jailbreak
A showcase of so-called “product art,” this blog never fails to feature something interesting – sometimes whimsical, sometimes provocative, sometimes just plain fun. This is a blog that always gets my creative gears turning. As someone whose taste generally runs strongly noncommercial, part of me resists a blog all about stuff you can buy…but I can’t deny the site’s consistent quality, and I like the story behind the blog:

Trained as a sculptor, Feinberg came upon an idea one day that would change his life: “what if, instead of selling one piece of his work for $5,000 he could sell 5,000 pieces of his work for $1 each?”