Looking for Mac Content? Try Reading Blogs

Do you find yourself craving more Mac related content than your daily hops around the internet provide? Do you look at weekends with a sense of foreboding because you won�t have the daily influx of Mac related reading material? If you answered yes to either of these questions I suggest you go outside and take a walk, there�s a great big world out there, sheesh. If you�re still bent on reading ever more Mac related goodness then I�ve got the solution: Blogs, specifically Mac related blogs. Side note: there’s a blog about nearly anything you’re interested in. Like Macromedia? Try this. Is Safari the only Mac thing you care about? Go here. Just a few examples to whet your appetite, there are plenty more blogs out there. Heck, there are seemingly more Mac themed blogs than customers served by McDonalds, you need never be without pipin’ hot fresh Mac content again.

The uninitiated might wonder what a blog exactly is. I know the name might put you off a little, after all it sounds like something you might hack up after a night of heavy smoking. But blogs are not befouled bodily excretions rather �blog� is just the truncated version of Web Logs. Of course this explanation gets us no closer to the actual answer, we�re just left wondering what a weblog is. Precisely defining a blog is fairly difficult. The general answer is that a blog is a daily journal posted on the web. Perhaps in the early infancy of blogging that may have been a true (and the definition does fit a great many blogs) but there are also a great number of blogs that focus on the Mac as well specific Mac related products. This trend makes sense even if you see blogs as a mere daily journal, Mac users are a passionate bunch so a journal of their daily thoughts would, predictably, contain a bit of Mac thought. Many Mac blogs have gone beyond this and are, in essence, frequently updated Mac opinion sites, some blogs even provide actual news. Some of these Mac blogs are quite well done, zeroed in solely on all things Macintosh and every bit as interesting as any revenue generating web site you might stumble across. A great many times you’ll be hard pressed to find any substantial difference between a well done Mac blog and a regular old web site publishing articles.

However, blogs also have their particular problems, problems reminiscent of the annoyances that cropped up when the internet was growing initially popular. The most glaring issue with the majority blogs is the content. Because blogging is a relatively new player on the scene some authors aren�t quite sure what to do with their blogs. You might read a particularly engaging and insightful article on the next release of OS X and upon returning to the informative blog the next entry is one sentence: �today I wore mittens.� Surely some of the charm of blogs lies in the lack of pretensions on the part of the authors but the wildly swinging unevenness grows tiresome very quickly. The second largest hurdle with blogs is locating the things. There are simply so many blogs that finding a single decent Mac related blog is a daunting challenge for even the most dedicated web surfer. The final problem, specifically endemic with Mac related blogs, is repetition. Everyone feels the need to comment on Panther (or whatever the latest news is) so you can end up reading essentially the same article 5,000 times.

These aren�t insurmountable issues. A newsreader that accepts RSS (RSS stands for three different things, one being �really simple syndication�) helps tremendously (I use NetNewsWire). Newsreaders allow you to view the blogs headlines of the most recent blog entries without having to actually visit the page. You can, for example, read the article titled �What Steve Jobs Told me in a Private Meeting� and ignore the next entry �My Heels are cracking, I think it�s a fungus.� Of course ignoring gratuitously personal entries won�t really help find you the worthwhile Mac Blogs but it does offer a method to avoid the more annoying daily whines and moans. To find the good stuff you�ll have to poke around. One of the best places to find nifty Mac blogs is the links provided on other Mac blogs. Again this method harkens back to of the early growth of the internet where folks posted �cool site of the day� links and such but this protocal remains an effective means of finding worthwhile Mac related blogs.

The astute long time internet user may notice some uncomfortable parallels between blogs and newsgroups. For those of you who came to the party late newsgroups are, in essence, unmoderated message boards. Like blogs everyone gets a say. Still blogs have some crucial features that the widely ignored (now) newsgroups don�t. Unlike newsgroups there is a certain level of responsibility in publishing blogs. Instead of a kajillion messages flowing into your newsgroup reader (where of course you could skip messages like you can skip headlines) the author is not so anonymous. The author also has to go to slightly more trouble to publish his blog than the newsgroup spammer. These factors are probably why Mac blogs seem so much more informative and readable than Mac newsgroups.

Where does all this leave us? We now have a seemingly inexhaustible resource for more Mac information, blogs full of speculation, commentary, insider stuff and programming notes. Additionally the sheer number of Mac blogs suggests that you�ll find a blog or two with info you really appreciate and written in a style that you find appealing. The downside of the Mac blog explosion is that very likely the Mac blogs you like will go away (you�ll find new ones) but that is the nature of catching a trend on the upswing: everyone will start a blog but in a year or two only the worthwhile will be left. In any event blogs can be another resource to add to your arsenal of Mac related web content. Of course no article of this nature would be complete without a something to get you started. So check out your first Mac blog here, it so happens that it’s a how to column on getting started with RSS, it also includes a link to a subscription list to a bunch of computer related blogs. And while your at it share your favorite blog links below by leaving a comment. Happy Mac reading!