My Read-Roll, Updated

About a year ago I posted my read-roll, the list of blogs I regularly read through RSS. I do approximately 99% of my reading through RSS now and I'm taking today to do a little housecleaning, both around the house and around the blog. I realized some elements of the old Puppet Show are woefully out of date, including the Control Panel that still had WizKids page on it (nuked that just now) and the blog roll, which is really just a list of friends.

So here's my updated read-roll, with the associated reasons why I regularly read these blogs and why you should check them out. Pardon my simplistic classification system. If your blog isn't here, why don't you drop me a line in the comments with a link and I'll check you out?

Apocalypse Blogs

• Post-Apocalypse UK News. Post-apocalyptic things - movies, books, etc. - with a focus on the UK.
  
• Quiet Earth. Simply put, Quiet Earth is the blog I'd write if I had time to write a blog full-time. Comprehensive in the way only the best news blogs are, it covers every scrap of news about post-apocalyptic and apocalyptic fiction in all of its many forms. Should they ever need a new or additional London correspondent, they should get in touch.
  
  Comics
  
• The Fate of the Artist. Eddie Campbell, who illustrated From Hell and was kind enough to link to my From Hell Walking/Riding Tour post, blogs here. I cannot say enough good things about him or his art, so I'll let the link speak for itself.
  
• xkcd.com. Fast becoming an online standard, xkcd is probably the only online comic I read every strip, and enjoy about 90% of the time.
  
  Cool Stuff - AKA my catchall category.
  
• Anacrusis. You may remember this blog from last time I did this exercise, and I'm happy to say that it is as good as it was then if not better. Still an enjoyable daily read.
  
• Boing Boing. I get most of the good links if my friends' shared items anyway, but old standard Boing Boing is on my list.
  
• Flying Pizza Kitty. I don't remember how I found this blog, but it consists of animated GIFs of a cat on a flying carpet in a variety of situations. Has a very distinctive 8-bit feel.
  
• Francesco Explains It All. Francesco Marciuliano, a writer and cartoonist, posts here. His posts are generally that kind of dry, biting humor that makes for an excellent read after a long day at work.
  
• Gibson Blog. Author William Gibson writer this blog. It is exactly what you'd expect from that equation.
  
• I CAN HAZ CHEEZBURGER. I'm almost ashamed to admit I read this every day, and occasionally even laugh out loud at those crazy cats with their Impact font expressions.
  
• io9. Gawker Media's Sci-Fi blog. Comprehensive, thought-provoking and often chock-full of interesting content.
  
• Jericho Blog. I keep this in my feeds in the hope that someday it will be updated with news of Jericho Season 3.
  
• John Cleese's Cleeseblog. Yes, former Python John Cleese has a blog. Still in its relative infancy, it is rapidly becoming a must-read.
  
• Laughing Squid. As noted in the prior read-roll post, I found Laughing Squid during the Vista launch days. I still read it every day, and Scott is an excellent source for various artistic strangeness.
  
• Lifehacker. I admit I largely skim Lifehacker as it is far more comprehensive than I have time to read, but there's always some really cool content there.
  
• Mashable! Mashable is kind of the 'it-girl' place for the social media industry. If you're on Mashable, you're 'it.' I've never been on Mashable.
  
• Mr & Mrs Smith Boutique & Luxury Hotel Collections. Doesn't exactly roll of the tongue, does it? A blog run by a travel company catering to couples and run out of London, they offer occasional deals and more importantly inspiration for travelling.
  
• O Chateau Blog | Stuff Parisians Like. A blog by Olivier Magny. My French coworker linked me to this blog, which is routinely hilarious even if you aren't Parisian, French or in either place. It reads exactly how I'd imagine a Parisian's blog to read.
  
• Offbeat Earth. I cannot remember how I found this gem, but it's a (mostly) picture blog about some of the generally crazy stuff you can find in this strange world of ours.
  
• Paleo-Future. They haven't updated in over a month so I hope everything's alright. Paleo-Future collects old news stories that predict what the future will be like, and compares them to how things have actually turned out.
  
• Proton Charging. I'm a Ghostbusters fan, and this site is your number one source of news for Ghostbusters-related things. And yes, there is news for Ghostbusters-related things. More than you'd imagine, probably.
  
• Something Awful Frontpage. There's a frontpage?
  
• Strange Maps. Another blog that I cannot recall how I found, but I read consistently when it updates. The blogger celebrates strange maps, either fictional, real, or just plain unusual.
  
• The Big Picture. I just added this within the last week, through one of my friends' shared items feed. It offers big pictures.
  
• YesButNoButYes Stories. I literally just added this feed yesterday. This is another collection of strange and interesting things.
  
• Living the Scientific Life (Scientist, Interrupted). Have science, will travel. A scientist's blog about science things and her travels, although it seems to be more of the later than the former. She also has a cool 'mystery bird' that she posts each day during the week so readers can try to guess/research what the bird is.
  
  Cricket Blogs
  
• Cricket-Blog.com. One of the two cricket blogs I read in my quest to try to make sense of the sport.
  
• King Cricket. And here's the other one.
  
  Friends and Family
  
• Accidentally Jewish. My friend and co-worker Leah's blog, about a variety of things, but often about experiences related to her conversion to Judaism.
  
• Become What You Behold. My friend Roger's blog.
  
• Being(s) Abroad. My buddy Brandon recently moved to Israel with his new wife, and this is their ex-pat blog.
  
• Bhagwan Redux. My friend Scott's blog.
  
• Confessions of a Palindrome. My friend and former co-worker Hannah writes this blog.
  
• A Doodle A Day. Buddy and fellow Alliterate Stan! posts, as you might guess, a doodle a day here.
  
• Dthon. Scott, former coworker and fellow Alliterate, blogs here from time to time.
  
• Grubb Street. Friend and fellow Alliterate Jeff Grubb's personal blog.
  
• High School Poetry. Angela hasn't updated in almost a year, but I know she will someday!
  
• Knit Jenious. I've linked to my friend Jen's blog recently and it's still worth checking out.
  
• Nothing good can come of this.... My friend and former coworker Jon's blog.
  
• Ober Dicta. My friend Seth doesn't blog much anymore, but I keep his feed warm just in case.
  
• Stephen D. Sullivan. Although I've never met him face to face, I owe a lot of my current fiction writing career to Stephen Sullivan and his Blue Kingdoms anthologies.
  
• The Monkey King. Friend and fellow Alliterate Wolfgang's blog.
  
• Vault. My friend Bob from college blogs here from time to time. I wish I could register to post comments there.
  
• Who's Your Baba? A little experiment from my family to see if they could blog. So far, I think everyone's updated once or twice and kind of let it sit.
  
• Tipping the Scales. My friend and coworker Amy started this blog, which I'm sure will start to get rolling when she's more into blogging.
  
  Gaming
  
• Adventure Classic Gaming. These guys are trying to keep the spirit of the old-school adventure game alive.
  
• Adventure Gamers' Blog. From the site AdventureGamers.com, a community of - yes - adventure gamers, including guys who love the classics.
  
• Avant Game. A blog by Jane, an ARG designer who it turns out helped work on Superstruct, where I've been spending some of my time lately.
  
• My Xbox 360's Blog. Smart little machine, isn't it?
  
• Classic Let's Play. Videos of old adventure games, run by yours truly.
  
• Darths & Droids. Hilarious webcomic about gamers and RPGs, set over a campaign spanning the Star Wars films.
  
• Dennis Detwiller's Blog. One of my favorite RPG writers/designers blogs here.
  
• Fallout 3: A Post-Nuclear Blog. This blog has been tracking Fallout 3 news since the last time I did this post, and will likely shut down once the game releases officially later this month.
  
• Gamerscore Blog. Microsoft's gaming blog. More advertorial now than anything else.
  
• Grand Text Auto. Calling GTA a 'gaming blog' is a bit like calling the Louvre an 'art gallery.' These guys are into the theory behind interactive fiction, and a whole host of other things too.
  
• Grumpy Gamer. Ron Gilbert, designer of Monkey Island, occasionally blogs here.
  
• How They Got Game. This blog, although updated infrequently, is always a great read about the history of video games.
  
• Kotaku. Hey, I have to get my current gaming news from somewhere.
  
• Online Fandom. It's really tenuous to classify this with gaming blogs, but it's the only category I could see as being close. Online Fandom is a great read about events and theory behind interaction online - focusing on entertainment. Which can mean gaming, and ARGs specifically.
  
• Play This Thing! Daily (kind of) reviews of games, from video to tabletop and more. A great discovery mechanism for finding new games.
  
• Robin D. Laws. Robin Laws is a big name in the RPG industry, and his blog about gaming and writing is consistently thought-provoking. He also does some pretty funny webcomics.
  
• Roleplaying Tips 2.0. Not so much a blog as it is a journal, RPGTips2.0 still has really good - you guessed it - RPG tips. I have used a lot of their suggestions as DM in the past, and will do so again when I'm back in America and DMing regularly.
  
• The Escapist. I subscribe to this mostly for Yahtzee's reviews, which you can't get in their own RSS feed.
  
• Total War Center Forums. Some forums actually have RSS feeds for their news! TWC is my source for news from the Total War series, of which I am a hopeless addict. There's a new one coming out next year...
  
• Twenty Sided. Despite being named for a dice, Twenty Sided does gaming news from across the spectrum with insightful commentary as well.
  
• Wonderland. Wonderland is run by Alice Taylor, who works on 'social software' - IE, multiplayer games. I'm not sure how I found this blog originally but I find her posts original, insightful and thought-provoking.
  
  History
  
• (pre)texts. I just subscribed to this blog on Friday through a link from one of the other history blogs I read, so I can't much vouch for its content yet. Yes, it's half in Greek, and no, I don't speak Greek.
  
• Roman Archaeology. Guess what this blog covers? News about archaeological finds of Roman ruins. Archaeology, specifically the Iron Age, is a hobby of mine so I read every word of every update on this blog.
  
• Roman Times. What Roman Archaeology doesn't cover, Roman Times does. Roman Times is more like an online scholarly journal, but updates regularly and frequently.
  
• The Archaeology of the Mediterranean World. A grad student authors this blog, which covers his adventures as an archaeologist focused on the Greeks, Romans and other inhabitants of the Mediterranean.
  
  London Blogs
  
• An American in London. She's not in London anymore and doesn't update much, but I still keep her on my read-roll because she was so helpful before I moved.
  
• diamond geezer. 'Geezer' doesn't mean 'old guy' in the UK like it does in the US, and as far as I can tell diamond geezer isn't old. In fact, his tours of London neighborhoods are absolutely fascinating, extremely well-researched and a pleasure to read. I learned of this blog because some people at Edelman talked to him once, I checked it out and was hooked.
  
• Going Underground's Blog. A blog devoted entirely to the Tube. Yes, and it's probably one of the absolute best London blogs. Annie Mole does an amazing job of collecting news, making interesting posts and taking pictures of people's shoes on the Tube. She's also a very nice person in real life.
  
• London Bloggers. The blog for the London Bloggers meet-up group. Transparency notice: I worked with them on behalf of one my clients once to sponsor an event, but was a 'member' of the group before then. Not that there's actual membership, mind.
  
• Londonelicious: A London Restaurant Blog. Nothing but reviews of restaurants in and around London. Helpful, since the Beautiful Competition and I enjoy eating out.
  
• Londonist. I know a couple of the people who write for it, and it's a member of the Gothamist network. It's also the single-best source for London news online as far as I'm concerned.
  
• Prince Charles Cinema. They publish their showtimes as an RSS feed. Isn't that helpful?
  
• Rachel from North London. Rachel's from north London, I'm from north London. I can't recall how I found her blog, but I read it faithfully.
  
• That Canadian Girl. Blog written by a Canadian ex-pat in London; I found this through Twitter, believe it or not.
  
• The Daily Mash. The Daily Mash is The Onion for the UK, except it posts three or four new stories each day.
  
• The London Review of Breakfasts. One of my favorite blogs, because the Beautiful Competition and I love eating breakfast together on the weekends.
  
  Music Blogs
  
• Ceci N'est Pas un Blog. Cover songs, but hasn't updated in a while.
  
• Cover Freak. An awesome cover song blog. Consistently posts great songs.
  
• Cover Lay Down. Another awesome cover song blog that focuses on folk covers. That would be folk artists covering other songs, mind you.
  
• Cover Me. Cover Me has an amazing variety of cover songs, and regularly posts stuff I've never heard before.
  
• Fong Songs. Cover and more covers. If you're into covers, Fong is a must-read.
  
• Hectic City - The Kleptones. Blog for The Kleptones, my favorite mash-up artist(s). This is how I find out about new Kleptones music.
  
• My Old Kentucky Blog. This is basically the be-all, end-all of music blogs online. Pitchfork wish they were this cool.
  
• Sideshow Cinema. Music from the movies. Of interest because of a project I might undertake...
  
  PR and Marketing
  
• HorsePigCow. When I first joined the digital practice, I asked one of my coworkers about good digital marketing blogs and they suggested HPC among others. I haven't looked back.
  
• Bokardo: Social Design. I think this one harkens back to that same request for blogs. Also a great read.
  
• CC Chapman. This is his personal blog, but Managing the Gray was a must-listen podcast before I even joined Edelman. I read what's up in CC Chapman's life here. Hopefully that's not creepy, because it's not intended to be.
  
• Carsonified. I started following Ryan Carson on Twitter, discovered this blog, and continue to read it. Good stuff.
  
• Church of the Customer. A lot of people in PR are coming around to the notion that online PR is a lot like customer service. These guys were on top of it years ago.
  
• Edelman Digital. I thought this blog was supposed to be called 'Authenticities' but hey, there you go. This is my company's blog. I contribute there from time to time. So do many other thought leaders at Edelman.
  
• Fallon Planning. Another of my must-reads, from the same 'what are some good digital blogs?' question.
  
• It's Not A Lecture. I found this through Twitter, and it's a great look at online conversations, with a special focus on American politics and how politicians use the Internet to foster conversation (or don't, as the case might be.)
  
• Jaffe Juice. Joseph Jaffe is one of the big hitters in digital PR, and this is his must-read blog.
  
• Jazamatazz. I met Jaz at the London Twestival, and have been reading her blog ever since. She's a fellow digital PR person, and she gives me serious neighborhood envoy (she lives in Shoreditch, I live in, um, Holloway.)
  
• Magazine Death Pool. I probably shouldn't celebrate the death of the old media, but I probably shouldn't have spent an hour this morning playing Duke Nukem on my Xbox 360 either.
  
• Make Marketing History. More marketing than PR, but a great read nonetheless.
  
• Managing the Gray. CC's podcast. The very first content related to digital PR I consumed online.
  
• MediaShift Idea Lab. A blog about shifting attitudes in media, specifically social media, from none other than PBS.
  
• Musing and Marketeerings. Danacea works for a London-based comic shop and is responsible for their online PR and marketing. She blogs here.
  
• Neville Hobson. If there's an inner circle of great digital PR people, Neville would be on it's leadership council. If you're in this industry and not reading Neville's blog, something is wrong with you.
  
• PR Squared. This is one of those blogs that I cannot remember adding to my read-roll, but somehow couldn't live without. Although I have to say I wouldn't help them with Seth. He's mean.
  
• Richard Edelman - 6 AM. Richard is our CEO, and actually runs a hell of a great blog.
  
• Simonsays. Simon was a colleague at Edelman in London before he joined the Beautiful Competition at Weber. He's also responsible for getting me thinking about anarchism as it relates to online communities, is a fantastic friend and a major rising star in our field.
  
• sizemore. @sizemore isn't really in digital PR in the same way I am, but I don't know where else to classify his extremely insightful and well-written blog. It's a good read on a variety of subjects.
  
• Social Media Explorer. I'm saying this right now: Jason Falls will be one of the major thought leaders in our industry in the next few years. He's already making a hell of a name for himself both on his blog and on Twitter, and I expect only great things from him moving forward.
  
• Social Media Snippits. I just added this blog a couple of days ago and can't really offer a good opinion of it yet, but it looks promising.
  
• Techno//Marketer. Matt Dickman is another big name in our industry, and his great blog is here.
  
• The Bad Pitch Blog. I use this blog all the time, mostly to show my co-workers how not to engage with the media. The Bad Pitch Blog is an amazing collection of screw-ups from digital PR people, and regular PR people who think the Internet works like traditional media.
  
• The Jeff Pulver Blog. Jeff Pulver isn't a digital PR guy per se, but he is an extremely well-respected thought leader in digital sociology (for lack of a better term.) And for good reason: he's ahead of the curve. He's also one of the most positive people I've encountered online, which is a refreshing change from the typical cynical negativity I see so much online.
  
• The Long Tail. Long tail distribution is only tangentially related to my every day job, but I can't think of any other way to classify Chris Anderson's blog - yet.
  
• The Marketing Blagger. This blog is run by Andy Bargery, who also runs the London Blogger's meetup. He also writes a highly recommended blog about digital marketing.
  
• The Pirates Dilemma. Matt Mason's book completely changed my perspective on what we can achieve online, and has helped shaped how I approach PR - and business in general. And this blog is an excellent complement to the book.
  
• The Way of the Web. I can't recall where I found this blog either. It stands out though as a great source for insight.
  
• Web Strategy by Jeremiah. Jeremiah Owyang is one of the brightest stars in our industry right now, and is a living, breathing example of doing everything right online. He's one of those people I look at and think 'hey, I want to be him someday.'
  
  Writing
  
• Authonomy. The blog behind HarperCollins' Authonomy project, which still needs a bit of a push to get off the ground.
  
• Jane In Progress. Jane writes for Battlestar Galactica and has written for Firefly in the past. She offers brilliant commentary on the TV industry, but more importantly she offers brilliant tips for writers.
  
• Permuted Press. Permuted publishes apocalyptic and zombie-related fiction. 'Nuff said.
  
• WEIRD TALES. The horror/sci-fi magazine. I keep hoping they'll publish something other than art, but hey, the art is cool too.
  
• JamesMelzer.net. James publishes a serial called The Zombie Chronicles. Check it out, if that's your thing.
  

And that's my read-roll. It's a lot longer than it used to be, eh? Again, if your blog isn't listed here, hit me up and I'll list it. There area few private blogs I read that aren't on here, so if you run a private blog you think I might read, don't worry.