My 2008 Blog Day Recommendations

It's Blog Day 2008, and here are my five recommendations for blogs this year. I'm trying to keep the spirit of the exercise alive and well while focusing on this part of the mission statement:

BlogDay was created with the belief that bloggers should have one day dedicated to getting to know other bloggers from other countries and areas of interest... bloggers from all over the world will post recommendations of 5 new Blogs, preferably Blogs that are different from their own culture, point of view and attitude.

Emphasis mine. So here are my five recommendations to Puppeteers. All are from different cultures, areas of interest or points of view:

• Ace of Spades HQ - Is it a surprise that my first recommendation is a conservative American political blog? It shouldn't be. I'm not a regular reader but I've seen stories from here pop up in my RSS feeds from time to time, and it won an award last year as Best Conservative Blog, beating out Michelle Malkin. The writing still falls into some of the same political pundit pitfalls that many political blogs do, but hey, I challenge any conservatives to recommend Daily Kos.
  
• Knit Jenious - I admit that I've been reading my friend Jen's blog for a while (since I've known about it, anyway) but knitting and I don't exactly go together - so I recommend you take a look if you're into it.
  
• King Cricket - I'm trying like hell to learn about the ins and outs of Cricket, my current home's baseball-like sport. This blog was recommended to me by a cricket coach (!) on Twitter, and is rapidly becoming a great daily read as I try to expand my understanding of the cricket world.
  
• Persian Paradox - An English-language blog written by a female Muslim from Iran. But not just any female Muslim - Masoumeh Ebtekar, the "first female Vice President of Iran" and "the spokeswoman of the students who had occupied the US Embassy during the Iran hostage crisis and ... a critic of the Taliban's oppression of women." (Source: Wikipedia). Why don't you give it a read and see if you can tear down one of your own mental stereotypes.
  
• Mr. and Mrs. Smith Boutique Hotels - And to end on a lighter note, a blog devoted to boutique hotels for couples. If my subscription to this doesn't reflect my changing values as I age, nothing does.

That's it for Blog Day '08. See you next year!